


Gate- 5- The Evil One

by sharkcar



Series: The Bad Sleep Well [15]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:26:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28447635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkcar/pseuds/sharkcar
Summary: An imagining of the lives of clones after the Clone Wars. Just some simple men, making their ways in the universe, in all their tragicomic glory.1- Something More- Cody slips through Tarkin's fingers2- Better Than Him- Rex worries about being a home wrecker3- All Due Respect- There are monsters out there
Relationships: Alexsandr Kallus/CT-7567 | Rex, Alexsandr Kallus/Garazeb "Zeb" Orrelios, CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody & Original Female Character(s), CC-3636 | Wolffe & Original Character(s), CC-3636 | Wolffe/Original Female Character(s), CT-7567 | Rex & Anakin Skywalker, CT-7567 | Rex & CC-3636 | Wolffe, CT-7567 | Rex/Original Female Character(s)
Series: The Bad Sleep Well [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1334464
Kudos: 4





	1. Something More

Chaleydonia, Christophsis

The deserted capital city of Christophsis was eerily beautiful and stunningly quiet. There was no movement but that of light across the crystal surfaces of the formations and structures.  
  
Asajj Ventress watched the streets from a vantage point high above the city. She was perched on a skyscraper while the little clones rode around on their speeder bikes below. She didn’t jam their communications, but instead closed her eyes, reached out in the Force, and listened to their words and thoughts.  
  
The clones were running a security sweep around their perimeter. Cody was at the head of the group informing the new shinies what the different buildings were made for.  
  
“That is a school, that one says it’s the public library, that one is a house or worship to the God of Money. He’s actually a Muun god. But the temples function as banks, so most major cities have them. When we were on Muunilinst we saw some of the biggest ones in the galaxy.”  
  
Some of the guys were chuckling about how pompous he was being. The war was mere months old, but he was acting like a know-it-all. They didn’t need to know these things and his talking while they were riding their bikes meant they didn’t get a moment’s peace.  
  
Ventress found Cody repellent. Arrogant men were disgusting enough. Arrogant men with no real power were offensive. They’d always been the worst sexists, she found, because they needed to find people to look down on and out-rank. And women tended to be acceptable targets.  
  
Asajj had been more powerful and talented than almost every man she’d ever met, but men’s confidence in their mediocre abilities was why they felt entitled to elbow ahead of her. And most people in power, who were almost all men, allowed them. Powerful men tended to humiliate her as a way of asserting their power, playing little games. Even men she genuinely had respect for were a threat to her.  
  
She had no use for this prick.  
  
“Big piles of money just on display behind bars in these places,” Slick shot in. His tone one of remembering his disbelief.  
  
Ventress read this one’s thoughts without him knowing. Non Force wielders tended to have no defense against threats they considered esoteric. Clones were no different. They had been raised in a lab, so the tangible was all there was as far as they knew.  
  
Ventress rifled through Slick’s mind to find his desires. Pretty typical male things, to live like some kind of pimp, to make his brothers envious. She could work with this idiot.  
  
“Alright brothers, fan out, report anything suspicious. We’ll rendezvous back here in half a tick,” Cody told them.  
  
Slick drove up beside a staircase, atop which he saw the facade of a beautiful building. A library, in fact. He felt the sudden compulsion to stop his bike and go into the place.  
  
He didn’t see her with his eyes, but he thought he did. She looked just like he always imagined she would.  
  
She was putting thoughts of herself in his head, veiling herself in a form he would find pleasing.  
  
She implanted desire so strong he would feel physical pain, aching for her. It was a dark Force power to compel loyalty. It worked best on the weak minded, especially men who felt sorry for themselves.  
  
‘You haven’t been getting what you deserve,’ she seduced him with his own entitlement.  
  
Yes, he thought, as he had thought already, that all of his brothers deserved better, why was he wrong for wanting something more for himself? He wasn’t the only brother who speculated they might take a chance if there was ever one to be had. They’d often played games of ‘what if?’ in their secret whispered conversations in the enlisted barracks at night.  
  
He wasn’t the only one. Every brother would understand the impulse. Some might even call it brave. Some might say it was an honest life.  
  
‘Yes,’ his thought of her agreed. ‘Anyone would do the same if they had the chance.’  
  
If he wasn’t going to look out for himself, who would? Suddenly he hated his brothers.  
  
‘This chance has come to you and only you,’ his vision of her was so beautiful he couldn’t stand it.  
  
He found himself actually pronouncing the words, “I will do anything you ask.”

  


En route to Rishi Moon

  


“I mean, it’s not like it’s a BIG deal. But it’s just like, if anybody was gonna remember, he should’ve,” Commander Cody was complaining about this yet again, repeating his gripes as a chronic malcontent.  
  
Captain Rex didn’t think there was as much to it as Cody was making out of Kenobi calling him ‘Captain’ by mistake.  
  
Cody just couldn’t help but see bias in it, whether intentional or unconscious.  
  
Rex found that funny. Cody and his stupid shit.  
  
“Just goes to show, we all look alike to THEM,” Cody managed to be offended by that of all things. “We’re not important to them, not like real people.” 'Real people' was intoned sarcastically.  
  
Cody had been ahead of Rex at the academy by six months. Cody was first class, Rex was second recruitment. Cody was older and out-ranked him. Still, they were friends. They worked for Jedi who were practically inseparable, so they had become so as well. Their friendship had come naturally. Like with their respective generals, there was a lot of love between them. They said things to each other they never said to other people.  
  
But Cody couldn’t help but notice, in a lot of ways, Rex was ahead of him. They knew it for sure because clones had every measurable statistic tracked and recorded on their id chips. They had both modestly ignored the numbers. But people were talking.  
  
Privately, Cody had a depressive streak that made him hold grudges and made him angry at the slightest provocation, so Rex knew not to act pleased with himself.  
  
Rex thought Cody didn’t see how his anger was holding him back. But people were asking Rex if he couldn’t speak with him about it. People were asking to be transferred away from him.  
  
“Well, everybody has their insensitive cringey moments,” Rex said something neutral, “We all make mistakes.”  
  
“Not Kenobi,” Cody still sounded sarcastic. Kenobi could be extremely critical. It was hard for Cody to live up to someone who was so universally respected, even by himself. He often found himself told how lucky he was to be learning from someone so accomplished.  
  
Cody could never seem to make Rex understand. Cody had pointed out how much Kenobi looked down on people without realizing that was what he was doing. Just by his biases, his taste in things, his unabashed criticism, what he found unacceptable. Or even in his word choice. Something like comparing a ‘clumsy, random blaster’ to an ‘elegant’ lightsaber might read as a value judgment on those who wielded the respective weapons in the army.  
  
Cody hated to admit it, but the only person who seemed to register the same offense as he did at it was none other than Skywalker. Skywalker saw how words unconsciously revealed how one envisioned the order of the universe to be. Cody had to admit, he loved to see Skywalker call him on it. He would have never dared himself.

  


Clone officers’ quarters, The Negotiator 

  


Cody had been off duty for barely an hour, but he was drunk already. He liked to drink while he read. More of his boring old Mandalorian strategy books.  
  
Cody started reading out loud when Rex came out of the refresher, “Listen to this, ’Armies fight to protect their homes and their families, or for financial and social incentive. In absence of these things, the strong can force people to fight, but in reality a slave army will only fight for one thing, the hope of freedom.’ Thousands of years of this and people have made no progress.”  
  
“You’re reading that again?” Rex didn’t share Cody’s enthusiasm. Rex found those books dull. All advice, no narrative. Or, whatever narrative context the thing might have had was buried behind historical references that were lost on anyone nowadays.  
  
All Rex knew was that studying history had a way of making Cody angry. He had been really angry a lot since that thing on Christophsis. He hadn’t felt like he had anyone else he could really talk to about it without being afraid what they might think.  
  
Slick’s betrayal had been an uncomfortable surprise to them all. But there was no denying it, they’d seen it with their own eyes. Disloyalty was possible, where their kind hadn’t known it before. Back in the Academy, brother never would have betrayed brother. They all had the same life, the same possessions were given to every one. There was nothing anyone could be too greedy about. So they had naturally decided they were all in it together. Slick had said he had done it because he wanted something for himself. His brothers’ lives were worth that to him. Now the clones were off Kamino and out in the wider galaxy, there were nearly infinite somethings to want.  
  
Cody understood the significance. Slick had gotten his brothers killed. Knowing and conscious of his actions. There was no going back from this.  
  
“Every time I read it, I think about it in a different way. Different observations speak to me, or I think of examples. I have all kinds of annotations about historical parallels. How things turned out,” Cody showed him. The margins of the text were filled with Cody’s own notes, maps and diagrams.  
  
It was real research and scholarship and he was proud of it. But no brother he’d met had ever cared what he was doing. Some appreciated the amount of work it took, but could not judge fairly whether the scholarship was legitimate and real or half made up. They didn’t know how much work it took. Or they didn’t care to know about the kinds of inquiries and endeavors he felt compelled to make. Why try and understand how things worked when it made no difference?  
  
Rex thought Kenobi might have been able to advise him, but Cody was famously reserved in extra-familial interactions. He actually had personal rules about it. Things he considered taboo. Like he wouldn’t be in a room alone with a natural born person behind closed doors. He would not allow himself to be intoxicated if he was alone with one. He seemed almost superstitious about THEM.  
  
Rex and General Skywalker didn’t seem to have boundaries, or they understood each other about what they were. He and his general were best buddies. They carried all the pretension-less love of a youngling napping on the floor with his arm around his pet.  
  
Cody didn’t know why that bothered him, but it did. It bothered him especially when Rex rushed to defend him.  
  
Rex was worried, to be honest. He wasn’t sure Cody was okay. But Rex was not even ten years old. He didn’t have the skills to express what he was seeing. And telling tales on brothers outside of family was considered a betrayal. But the brother was drunk every night.  
  
Cody was insisting they drink together. Rex didn’t really feel the need all the time. Waking up was hard after. But it was hard to say no. They lived in the same room much of the time.  
  
“So you watching the game?” Rex asked, to get his brother to go do something with him.  
  
That way the two of them would not be alone together.  
  
Rex wasn’t sure if it was worth bringing up again and trying to correct Cody’s drunken assumptions. Cody had claimed not to remember what happened. Like made a point to actually say it, so as to excuse what he said. But the night before, he’d said some pretty unfair things about Skywalker. Rex didn’t want to hear it anymore.  
  
For a guy who was supposedly blacked out, Cody had been pretty articulate. Rex suspected he meant it, but upon not convincing him, Cody backed off and pretended it meant nothing.  
  
Rex remembered Cody’s words specifically, because they seemed to be consistent with the way he’d always acted.  
  
“If you consider HIM as close to you as one of US, then what does that mean for us? We don’t all have phenomenal cosmic powers. What if he just decided that your love meant your loyalty? How far would you go to help him? You already keep secrets for him. Would you break him out of jail? Sure, if he told you the jailers were unjust. Would you do favors for him, or suspect a brother on his say so, or accept that he knows better than we do about what we need, or accept him as our leader with no option to change sides if HIS conflicts throw us into battle? Where is the line?”  
  
Rex had thought that the rant was unsolicited, but he had to admit, all the prospects Cody had brought up now bothered him where they hadn’t before.  
  
Rex thought it was abusive of Cody to try to tell him who to love. He couldn’t just use potential scenarios to legislate governance over his heart.  
  
Anakin Skywalker would never betray him. That man was brother to him, whether Cody wanted it that way or not.  
  
Rex dragged Cody out for the game. They were in the common room, among their brothers. Cody sat quietly and drank. Rex sat with Skywalker, side by side in their matching sports watching jerseys.  
  
\--

  


Republic Occupied Airbase, Umbara

  


Rex sobbed against Cody’s armor. Cody clattered as he embraced him and let him pour it out. It was the first time Rex had ever really cried like that.  
  
Cody soothed with a phrase, whispered, repeated, “Ner vod, ni cuyi olar.”  
  
Finally, Rex stilled.  
  
Cody stroked the back of Rex’s head and kissed his forehead. “You were here all alone!”  
  
That was true. Skywalker had been called back to Coruscant at the Chancellor’s request.  
  
“He tried to mind control us, but we’ve been trained, Fives and I,” Rex backed up and wiped his eyes with his gloved hands.  
  
“Where is Fives, is he alright?” Cody placed his hands on Rex’s pauldrons, looking him in the eyes.  
  
“We lost a bunch, from your squad too, bringing Krell back in. The plants got a few. I have the deceased lists. We lost Hardcase before. And Dogma...”  
  
“We lost Waxer. I heard that,” Cody whispered. “Rex, this was planned against us.”  
  
“I told you, just because we can’t use the Force doesn’t mean it can’t be used to hurt us. Krell said he had just done this to cause suffering. He doesn’t even KNOW who the Lord of the Sith is, but he was willing to slaughter us to please some entity he foresaw. The Force, the Sith, it’s true! All of it!”  
  
“Krell was an extremist before,” Cody had read about some of his religious opinions. Krell was always against new technology of any kind, especially where reproduction was concerned. “He never should have been allowed to be a general.”  
  
“Why didn’t anyone say so before?” Rex choked.  
  
Cody had said so before, but he didn’t want to admit to Rex who he’d said it to. He’d let himself be alone in a room with the Chancellor. It was the only place he felt safe telling the things he knew. The Chancellor had assured him that he could express himself freely without fear of reprisals. Cody was okay with it if he was in control. The Chancellor had given him information, too.  
  
“The Jedi Council claimed they couldn’t argue with his seniority. Ineffective as ever. And they won’t submit to oversight of any kind.”  
  
Rex looked thoughtful, “Who told you this?” Rex couldn’t see Kenobi betraying Jedi Council secrets. Skywalker had said nothing about this to him, and Skywalker told him everything, so he thought. Skywalker seemed to complain about the Jedi Council, too, so he would have mentioned this.  
  
“What does it matter? They obviously didn’t do anything about it,” Cody dismissed.  
  
After that, the Chancellor had given Cody a direct holo-comlink between them, that he was to use if he ever saw anything untoward by a Jedi in the field. Cody had willingly taken what little power he was given.  
  
–

  


Anakin Skywalker’s Flagship (literally what he named his second star destroyer, because he was the author of his own humor), En Route from Yerbana

  


“Rex, I’m worried about you. I know losing Fives was hard,” Cody had barely come through the door when he started. He always barged right into conversations.  
  
Fives had died, Rex believed, because he had discovered the truth about the chips. Rex had insisted on filing his report about it.  
  
“But brother, please. Fives had a virus. The Kaminoan doctors said they discovered it when they did the autopsies on him and Tup. You know that.” It was like Cody was trying to tell Rex what to believe, “We all had the inoculation. All that other stuff, about Dooku creating us, that’s not real. Lying is what Sith do, so the Jedi say.”  
  
No, Rex thought, Skywalker had told him about it. It was true. Jango was hired by Tyranus, Tyranus was Dooku. Dooku was evil, ergo, there was no reason for him to create them that wasn’t evil. Fives had said there was a plot against the Jedi and Fives wasn’t lying.  
  
“Stop talking to me like I’m crazy! I know what I know!” Rex surprised himself with how angry he was getting, “I can’t believe that you won’t listen. If there is even the slightest chance that Fives was right, would you risk it? Would you risk killing General Kenobi?”  
  
“Rex, there is no chance of that happening. Stop saying things like that. Look, I’m just trying to get you to at least entertain the possibility that you have been under a lot of stress. That you might not be seeing things clearly or making the best decisions,” Cody did not betray any of the telltale signs that he did not believe what he’d been saying.  
  
That made Rex angry, he thought he’d made a decent case, “It’s not just about Fives! This planet we’re invading was nearly extinct from what war brought! And the suffering there never ends. When can we stop?” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a good meal, or a decent shower, or held a woman. He had thought all of that self-deprivation had been for something. But what he now knew was true contradicted that.  
  
“But Rex, we’re protecting innocent people. We always have,” Cody appealed to Rex’s sense of duty.  
  
“So to save one people from devastation, we wipe out another? Who’s left then? And if we survive, how will anyone be able to trust each other again? We may have already gone too far!” Rex was talking about the future at the expense of the moment.  
  
Cody fell back on the official message, “I’ll never trust Separatists! We have to beat them. They’ve killed millions of us!”  
  
“The Death Watch, or this Shadow Collective, are not Separatists!” Rex told him.  
  
“Same difference. The Death Watch are murderers, terrorists, and rapists, never mind the criminals in the Shadow Collective. The galaxy is better off without them,” Cody got to his point. Somebody had to make sure there was fairness.  
  
“So we exterminate them, what then? And what can we hope for? Either the peace begins and they have no use for soldiers, or the war goes on and we will keep dying. When is it enough?” Rex asked questions as if they were things worthy of quibbling over.  
  
Cody hazarded all he dared hope for, “We will be there when the peace is made. We will help make it and ensure this never happens again.”  
  
Rex was done, “You honestly trust the Republic?”  
  
“Don’t you?” Cody pleaded.  
  
“Not anymore.”  
  
Rex had walked out after that. It was clear where his brother stood. He had nothing left to say.  
  
–

Eriadu- Twenty years later

  


Cody and Nelli walked out the palace gate that night. They’d made sure to grab some smelly kitchen aromatics and some rotten meat to make them stink like filthy beggars. That way, the guards would get out of their way to let them through. Nobody wanted to search and frisk someone who smelled rotten. They might have disease.  
  
The two of them ditched the garbage and went to the orchards on a high slope on one side of the palace hill to doss. They lay down under some overhanging shrubs.  
  
“Do you know about the gods?” Nelli looked up, but the light polluted city allowed no stars. But she knew they were there, same as back in her village in the forest.  
  
“Well, it would be hard for me to worship my creators,” Cody admitted, “They didn’t tell us to worship them. They just required obedience. Still, everything the way it was, good or bad, could be blamed on them, I guess. I’m not angry at them. They made me for their own reasons, I just do the best I can.”  
  
Nelli was confused, “So you don’t believe in praising gods?”  
  
“Well, a lot of religions say we should thank creators for making us. But I’ve met my creators. They were mortal beings with the same flaws and weaknesses. They didn’t tell me they’d gifted me with a precious immortal soul. They didn’t love their creation. In my life, some people have held that against me, that I wasn’t made like most people. But I couldn’t change it, I know how and why I was made,” Cody realized what he was describing sounded absurd in human terms. But it had been his reality for so long, he didn’t question it.  
  
Nelli had her reality, “The gods didn’t make you or give you a soul? Then how are you alive? My mommy said the gods made everyone alive. Even me, though sometimes some people thought I was a curse. My mommy wouldn’t hear it. And people listened.”  
  
Cody nodded under his sheet, “I don’t doubt it. People can feel for one another. Anyone can see you’re human.”  
  
Nelli didn’t understand. He just looked like a man to her. Even under the burkah, he had a man way of lying down. “Do they not see you are?”  
  
“My dear one, I have seen it with my own eyes that I was made by beings that thought I was a commodity,” Cody admitted.  
  
“My mommy said anything that doesn’t have a soul is evil. Are you good or bad?”  
  
“I am neither. I was made the way I am, I didn’t get to choose it,” he shrugged.  
  
“My mommy said the gods will save the good people,” Nelli insisted.  
  
“No god ever offered to save me,” Cody admitted. “Not like you did.”  
  
“My mom told me that people who don’t worship the gods serve the Evil One. Do you?” Nelli asked.  
  
“I...I have met the one who made my life the way it is. The one whose grand design my creation was a part of. I was made on a template to his specifications and he controlled my life and purpose. I once trusted his intentions were good. I was wrong. I am positive he is the evil one. I don’t serve him anymore, but I am still the way he made me,” Cody differentiated.  
  
“So you don’t serve anyone?”  
  
“I follow my heart,” Cody admitted what his religion was now. “I’ve got one of those.”  
  
“Well, my gods say everything alive has a soul. So I will believe you do too. My mommy was never wrong about most things.”  
  
“I appreciate the effort for my sake. I believe in you too,” Cody nodded off to sleep.  
  
–  
  
Soon a pair of opportunistic rapists came around.  
  
They didn’t expect the burkah mother to come at them like a vengeful ghost and dispatch each with a combination of moves that included a very specific kick in the fibula hard enough to break the bone. They were rendered helpless to give chase.  
  
Cody had lived half his life on the run from people who wanted to kill him. Effective escape tactics were practically his specialty.  
  
Cody grabbed Nelli’s hand and they ran to the nearest cemetery to hide. The drug addicts in there mostly scattered at seeing them, getting afright as they saw Nelli and the ‘ghost’ run through holding hands in the strange low lights.  
  
Cody and Nelli made their way slowly into the sprawl of buildings at the foot of the hill.  
  
They found an abandoned ground floor of an illegal apartment building that was not much more than concrete and rebar, with piles of sand here and there. They hid in a dark corner on the second floor and waited for light of dawn to catch a few hours sleep.  
  
–  
  
Cody dreamed as he lay in the state of vigilant half sleep, when visions would start. He had a stress dream where someone was chasing him.  
  
His Lord was trying to find him. But he awoke with a jump. Nelli told him to knock it off. Then he dreamed in another color.  
  
‘Abandon all hope,’ Cody heard his master say.  
  
Snowflakes falling on a castle in the mountains. Suddenly, all was fire and ash and fragments becoming asteroids and blown into space. He awoke while it was still dark out.  
  
He opened his eyes in the dark, so see if there was anything he could see. He was unsure if he was still wide awake or nodded back off. But he was sure of what he knew. This was no dream. Tarkin had said they had a weapon that was made to destroy whole worlds. He needed to warn his people, even if he never made it off Eriadu.  
  
Cody had always wanted his people to wrest themselves from the affairs of the warring religious factions in galactic politics. It was difficult, since clones had been created to be pawns in the biggest religious war in a thousand years. He’d refrained from committing to a belief system, though his wife was sentimental about the symbols of some good people of her youth.  
  
What they did from there on out needed to be discussed. Knowing Vader’s identity did bring them a bit of useful intel, especially if he didn’t know they knew it. If Niki was still trying contact Vader, Cody could remember very specific things to mess with him. So Cody fell back to sleep remembering some funny stories about General Skywalker and making himself laugh. Nelli demanded he tell her. He found, the more he remembered Skywalker the man, the better he felt able to contend with Sith.  
  
\--  
  
They were walking in a residential slum. No set streets, really more, beaten dirt roads.  
  
“So then, all of a sudden, Jedi Skywalker decides he’s gonna fly off after this Force witch in the middle of a battle and I’m left there now commanding the naval assault AND the ground campaign. I didn’t give the medic a chance to work the laser stitch very well, so I’m just glad I didn’t lose an eye. That campaign was chaos.”  
  
“Did you fight in many battles?” Nelli asked.  
  
“I sometimes think I was in all the battles,” Cody joked.  
  
“With real life wizards and witches. Huh. I’ve never seen anyone like that. With magic powers, making armies fight their wars,” Nelli admitted.  
  
“It wasn’t just their war. We were all glad to fight together. Proud even. A lot of people are still attached to them here, huh?” Cody calculated.  
  
“Of course, everyone believes in the Force. Except Tarkin,” Nelli had observed him denigrate superstition and rrrrrreligion (with trilled resh).  
  
“Even his wife attends services at the Force church. Although, her church recognizes the Emperor as the protector of divine law,” Cody had read about the interesting phenomenon of religious synchretism. “We’re gonna need help. I need to get to some communications equipment, I have contacts on planet, but they are a hundred kilometers from here. We’ll need transport,” Cody told her.  
  
“What kind of people are these friends of yours?” Nelli asked.  
  
“Well, they aren’t exactly the kind of people I would introduce to my children, but they know how to get in touch with my people. I trust they’ll rescue us because the company I work for makes them a lot of money. So I’m worth something to them that might be more than Tarkin could offer.” Cody assured her.  
  
The entertainment company owned by Concordia Spice had properties that were distributed by a company on Eriadu. They dealt in other types of contraband as well, so they were valuable partners in business. But Niki had said that she wouldn’t leave her daughter alone in a room with any one of these sleazebags.  
  
Cody needed help getting smuggled off world in a tight security situation, with no identification and a human female with no documents. Cody knew that he might not be able to trust them not to turn around and sell him to the Empire if they thought that was more lucrative than their present trade relations. He trusted he could talk his way out of that one.  
  
–

  


Rishi, three days later, the royal residence

  


“Has everyone reported back yet?” the queen asked her close council, as they gathered in the gazebo after dinner. The night was cool, so they had the hearth ablaze, and blankets.  
  
Shizla stabbed at the embers.  
  
Niki hit a switch and a holo-viewer showed an image of the ‘logged in’ accounts. “Ninety eight percent.”  
  
“The Intelligence service has headed out to Scarif to identify the ships in the blockade, they’re due back in three rotations,” Shizla informed them.  
  
“The rest house ready for those Kothlis guys?” Niki asked the Head Intelligence Officer.  
  
“They’ll be here tonight,” Victory read from a datapad.  
  
“But they must be terrified,” the queen shook her head. “I should go talk to them.”  
  
Niki shook her head, “Not unless they ask.”  
  
Lina found she actually welcomed the chance to do something she liked doing, comforting people was a nice part of her ceremonial job. It made her feel comforted in her own uncertainty. “Have you gotten an impression of them?”  
  
Blue kept on top of fraternal goings on, “Lucky says he thinks the enbee is a gold digger. Asks a lot of questions about the company. Seems to know more about it than the brother,” Blue gossiped. Lucky was the Rothana clone Rex referred to as ‘Doc’. ‘Grumpy’ was called Dan, while ‘Dopey’ was named Nalual.  
  
“A gold digger? Oh, I can’t wait to see this little hoochie,” Lina smiled sarcastically. “And the brother?”  
  
“One of us old geezers. Got one of those chip scars, which is interesting. Dan said they said he acted a little like his boyfriend made him nervous,” Blue spread more conjecture, but as he was the oldest Fett clone in the group, he did have an authority on his own kind. Body language and clone subtext was a recognized expertise in the close council. “So of course, the Kothlis guys have been taking bets on the scenario.”  
  
Shizla facepalmed, “Oh, not this again.”  
  
Gambling and drinking were detrimental vices, Shizla thought. Not because no one around her indulged in them. Shizla was a Weequay pirate. She knew that life first hand. But her experience had led her to conclude that more time, effort and money was lost to the stupid shit. Drink and debt contributed to spreading disagreements and negative feelings, and of course violence. Stuff that could hold a crew back. “This is why I can’t put you in charge of anything, everything turns into some game.”  
  
Blue cleared his throat and took out a list from his belt pouch, “Scenario Lucky, The Imp is trying to marry money. The brother is clueless. Scenario Dan, The Imp’s looking to get money and the Imp has some kind of ownership over this brother, either by debt or brainwashing. So the brother knows what’s happening and feels compelled. Scenario Nal, They are what they say they are, just a couple want to be together. We speculated that they would either be happy about having to get married as the entry requirement, or they wouldn’t,” Blue took out his datapad to take bets.  
  
“I can suss them out if you want,” Niki offered.  
  
Lina shook her head, “No, I want to do this myself. I will put thirty tins of spice on Nal’s idea.” She always bet on the romantic option.  
  
Blue and Lina’s secretary Xi’an both recorded the transaction as official.  
  
Niki and Shizla shook heads at each other, they agreed that was the only one it probably wasn’t. Older clones tended to be so grateful for any kind of interest in them that they’d try very hard to make a person happy, including promising money they didn’t have.  
  
The queen returned to business, “Is there any other news?”  
  
Vic was in charge of monitoring, “Listening station on the moon is set up to receive Imperial transmissions. We can’t decode them all. But standard form, there is no termination order filed for Tegaanalur. Which is weird. If someone could confirm they killed him, the Imperial bonus is three and a half million. I don’t think even Bland Muff-Karkin’ would turn up his big ol’ nose at that. Never mind the prestige.”  
  
Vic had phrased it in a way to leave her some room for hope. It didn’t mean anything. Grand Moff Tarkin could execute anyone at will. They had absolutely no reason to think Cody was anything but shot out an air lock or a carcass that Tarkin fed to his anoobas.  
  
Lina had no delusions, even as she clung to her last thread. She knew how the Tarkins treated the people they ruled over. She didn’t want to have to specifically picture her husband’s dismemberment, yet the images flashed into her head at night keeping her awake. One after the other. Like they were being forced upon her.  
  
She had been having nightmares since that first one. It was perfectly understandable in her position, that she would feel stressed. But a presence just kept recurring. Whatever it was seemed to have hold of Cody in her previous nightmare. Although she had not seen her husband again. She found the other presence kept returning.  
  
The sensation was becoming familiar. She couldn’t breathe. She’d tried new pillows and wearing something different to bed. But she couldn’t seem to escape the feelings the nightmares brought, that something was there, searching for something.  
  
–  
  
The next night at dinner, the queen came bearing news of the couple in the rest house.  
  
“So care to change your bet, Alor?” Victory asked.  
  
Lina was more confident, “No. They seemed very nervous about getting married, but there is definitely a real relationship there. They were exchanging looks privately the whole time,” Lina observed. “They agreed to go through with a marriage. We can have a small gathering on the rest house roof. Hang some strings of lanterns at least, dress up, have a cake.”  
  
She had suddenly remembered the lanterns at her own wedding. At the thought, Lina’s tonsils felt like they had swollen up. Just another one of the hundreds of times each day that she remembered. Though there had been no body, and no funeral, and no tangible acknowledgment of Cody’s passing. Nevertheless, Lina’s world had been overturned.  
  
She had not yet had the time to face her widowhood, never mind find the opportunity to express to anyone how deeply lonely she felt knowing that her future would unfold without him.  
  
She was her people’s queen, they were suffering. She had no allowance to feel bad for herself. As her children’s mother, she had to be strong enough to help them feel safe.  
  
If she wanted to hang lights and put out some flowers and have a little celebration of love, then why not? She could cry for joy and maybe pour some of it out of her system.  
  
Niki was eager for anything that could buoy the queen’s spirits, and her own, “Just a small ceremony, a few guests, but staged beautifully. I’ve got a song I want the band to try out, they can debut it. First dance or something.”  
  
Lina facepalmed laughing, “You’re gonna make him dance? Oh, this poor brother.”  
  
As a welcome to the family, the queen’s people customarily hazed new guys with pranks.  
  
Niki felt good to hear her friend laugh.  
  
–  
  
Scarif

  


“The Intimidator, the Persecutor...enough TIE fighters to block out the sun. What in all of Abrion sector is worth two star destroyers and that shield?” Goran read the scan.  
  
“I hear Scarif has beautiful beaches,” Stabbi offered.  
  
“Tarkin’s pasty ass would burn like a crayfish in a pot,” Sh’ehn contended.  
  
Goran looked at a scan of the shield gate, “Well, the strill’s asshole is worth a staggering amount of credits. For it to be put out here where nobody can see it makes no sense for intimidation. We’re the only thing out here and they could have intimidated us with a lot less. It’s not like the planet is some kind of resource they’re sitting on, like a spice mine.  
  
“Unless they put something out here to hide it and then realized they had to secure it. In which case, they don’t know we know it’s there, do they?” Sh’ehn reasoned.  
  
“Well, the only piece of significant Imperial hardware is still the old records vault,” Goran paged through the scans with finger flicks on the scanner screen.  
  
“A library?” Stabbi was incredulous.  
  
“Heavy military presence in the facility,” Goran was even more suspicious.  
  
“So do we try to break in and see what’s there?” Stabbi plotted.  
  
“Are you kidding? Did you not hear me before? Two star destroyers? TIE fighter curtains? The Strill’s asshole? Do you not have a notion of the relative size of that force? We’re sitting here in this little shuttle,” Sh’ehn facepalmed.  
  
“What? Are they bigger than us?” Stabbi asked.  
  
“There are few entities in the galaxy that could organize enough firepower to even take on ONE star destroyer,” Goran explained.  
  
“What about those people on Lothal a couple years ago? Took out Tarkin’s own one,” Stabbi knew he’d read about that.  
  
“I heard that whole planet got wasted in a pergill attack just last year,” Goran kept up on the news.  
  
“I wonder if anybody else wants to know about this, they might have a notion of what the strill’s sitting on. Who might pay for intelligence like this?” Sh’ehn calculated.  
  
Stabbi nodded, “I bet I know. What about that senator Fenn Rau said was running a ‘vanity revolution’?”  
  
“Alderaan? I’ve always wanted to visit. I want to try out a turtle neck,” Stabbi considered.  
  
Sh’ehn spun the ship around, “We can discuss that after.”  
  
“Are we headed home?” Stabbi asked.  
  
“Nah. Special intelligence operation,” Sh’ehn had taken this one on himself, “We’re going to go see if there’s any chance old Cody is still among the living.”  
  
“That would save our play,” Goran looked on the bright side. Nobody liked their peculiar musical comedies as much as Cody did, so they wrote a lot of their jokes for him.  
  
If he was dead, the Life Day performance of their new Mandalorian historical musical comedy play would fall flat. They’d had a whole running joke about a book written by Boba Fett, because Cody was famous for accusing his brothers of being illiterate. 

  


Eriadu

  


There were several speeders parked in a vacant lot between buildings. Cody hotwired an ancient vehicle that had no tags. That skill set had been in the clone training manuals. Skywalker’s contribution, so he’d heard. Most of Skywalker's contributions had been related to theft and escape.  
  
Cody’s only problem was that he had forgotten the law of the land was no women pilots.  
  
The police thugs were soon after him with speeder bikes.  
  
A chase ensued. Cody had to run them all into debris or buildings. His flying was reckless, especially considering he could only half see from under the burkah. He didn’t think he killed any of them, just lost them in crashes into clothes lines and trash. But he had to admit, he hadn't gone back to check.  
  
Police were alerted to a woman pilot. Cody abruptly ditched the burkah, throwing it at the last bike pilot, causing him to slow down.  
  
The speeder ran out of fuel, so they ditched it and left on foot.  
  
“Is this how kings live? Is this why people like hearing stories about them?” Nelli asked honestly.  
  
They looked around. Cody wasn’t sure what neighborhood of the massive urban sprawl they were in.  
  
“Do you know this place?” Cody asked.  
  
“A lot of the palace guards live down here,” Nelli pointed back at the police they’d ditched, “I wouldn’t worry about them. They like you,” she informed him.  
  
“What do you mean?” Cody hadn’t thought anyone liked him.  
  
“They have been talking about you. ‘And then I’m going fishing!’ You said that and they all thought it was so funny. I didn’t know the other words they were using, something about a mother and children,” Nelli remembered.  
  
Cody smiled. He had told Tarkin he could shove his offer to mediate an alliance with the Emperor. Cody had ended up taunting him in low class Eriadan dialect that roughly translated to how he was going to escape, have dirty sex with the mother of his own children and then take a day off. He was proud to hear that his intended audience had heard him.  
  
Tarkin’s guards had nothing in common with Tarkin except a home world. He ruled and they were subjects. Old Wilhuff was culturally typical for people brought up on Core worlds with money. Tarkin’s personal palace guards were thugs for hire on a world where thuggery paid well, and had no issue with turning the thuggery on their own people. In the capital, they acted as Tarkin's personal police force. They were paid better than most of the world’s citizens, so if they inflicted their violence disproportionately at the poor, they avoided affecting anyone who mattered to them personally, or those above them who could do them favors. Nobody else liked the palace guard. So their community was insular. The neighborhood around the guard academy was their territory.  
  
They had been captivated by Cody’s use of their dialect and his character that he played with his choice of words and bravado. He’d been sure he was going to die, he just wanted to leave Tarkin a mess. Make him paranoid that his own thugs could laugh at him. Maybe seeing someone stand up to Tarkin would embolden them to do something about their own shitty leadership. It was not likely to change much, but he had thought he had run out of paths, so just wanted to put that energy out there. Now he had a new idea.  
  
\--  
  
Nelli showed him to the pub where the guards drank. The guard captain was in there doing a Tarkin impression with dramatically trilling reshes. The other guards were laughing at their pompous ruler.  
  
Nelli snuck up to the group of them, “Tell the other story! The one about the fishing king!” Nelli demanded, doing her best to sound clueless.  
  
“Are you even old enough to be in here, toothless,” the guard captain called her.  
  
“He said he wants to hear it,” Nelli indicated the entrance portal.  
  
“We all know that one,” Cody entered the pub.  
  
“You...we thought you were dead!” the guard captain had been in the room when Cody had made his salacious pronouncement. He recognized the man instantly.  
  
“I still could be,” Cody answered cryptically.  
  
–  
  
They brought him a cloak and a pint. He didn’t touch the drink, but thanked them for it.  
  
“Is that some kind of religious thing?” the guard captain asked, pointing at the drink.  
  
“Yes,” Cody bullshitted. He learned by watching Kenobi how to use people’s assumptions. “The Force forbids it.”  
  
“Is that why you were arrested? Because you believe in your religion?” the guard captain asked. He sounded sympathetic.  
  
Eriadu had a large number of people who were traditionally very religious, devoted to a Republic era faith that was a hybrid of the Force religion, Bendu, and their own traditional beliefs. Missionaries had brought adherents over by stressing that Force faith and their own were not mutually exclusive, but one. By that time, religion was mostly used as a justification for social norms. Most people got very emotionally attached to Force religion, believing it represented whatever they thought ‘good’ was. Religion was something beautiful and innocent that made them able to feel things. They suffered no insult to it and could be provoked to violence to defend her, like their mother.  
  
The Tarkin regime had just overlaid this with the Imperial cult of patriarchal obedience once they came to power. However, the cult of the Emperor was mostly left to the upper classes to compete against each other with demonstrations of loyalty to the divinely ordained Emperor and his off-world leadership. For instance, they would compete over who could dedicate the most expensive or impressive additions to the cathedral. But most people on Eriadu had no personal participation in such a thing that wasn’t government mandated, like a parade for Empire Day. The lower classes, therefore, stuck stubbornly with their old ways, and the upper classes scoffed at their superstition.  
  
Cody spun a tale, “Yes. I’m a priest of an order of warriors tasked with defending a vergence artifact, the Cup of Kenobi.” Whether people in the universe believed the Jedi were evil or not, Kenobi’s name evoked power. “It can foretell the future, grant eternal life, pour out more food and money than anyone could ever use. But whoever possesses the cup can also use it to destroy worlds. My people and I protect this power from escaping. We know its location. Tarkin and the Imperials want it, I have to stop them. He doesn’t have to know you helped me.”  
  
“Damn right we’ll help!” the captain shouted. His father, a retired guard captain himself, was seated at the bar in tears, clutching his Bendu pendant.  
  
“Praise the Force!”  
  
“The Force is with us!”  
  
Nelli had been discreetly draining Cody’s pint. She was thirsty and there wasn’t anything else on the table.  
  
Cody went on, using a standard script for fraud, “I really feel like you were meant to come to my aid. It is your destiny.”  
  
–  
  
Thalassa Tarkin had had enough. Her husband had been lying to her. He lied! They had fought, and one accusation led to others, then to others. It was now escalated to a disturbing level that they’d never been to before.  
  
In the course of one argument, Thalassa had asked Wilhuff what had happened to a friend of hers. The woman had been a confidante. A few months back, she had disappeared. Thalassa had told herself at the time that it had nothing to do with her. Although, now she was not so sure. Some of her husband’s explanations didn’t add up.  
  
Thalassa had seen guard droids stationed around the old gate house, but had not questioned what they might be guarding. She was terrified of what she might find. But she couldn’t sleep at night. So one evening, she took her tiny purse pistol and snuck down to the gate house.  
  
“You are specifically forbidden from entering this perimeter,” the stupid droid told her.  
  
“Get out of my way, I demand to know what you’re guarding!” she raised her blaster.  
  
“Ma’am, you are specifically forbidden from entering,” one droid told her. “It’s our programming.”  
  
“It’s my house. I’ll do what I want, get out of the way,” she waved her hand like the machines stunk. Which they did a little.  
  
“You are specifically forbidden,” the droid went to bar her way.  
  
Thalassa shot each guard in turn. Nobody was going to tell her where to go in her own house. This was absurd.  
  
She shot the door panel and was certain she would find something horrifying. Instead, there was nothing aside from some smelly food trash and empty bottles. And a pair of scissors.  
  
Thalassa picked them up and went to the staff quarters to see who had last signed out this particular implement. She found the name of that poor creature her son had raped. That woman had probably tried to perform an abortion on herself or something. Thalassa didn’t approve of that. But as the girl was a mongoloid, she had probably done the gene pool a favor. That explained the missing bedsheet as well. Probably wrapped up the mess. The girl’s appearance had been bothering Thalassa ever since the incident, the way she insisted on showing off her ink stains like some badge of honor.  
  
Thalassa asked around the servants’ quarters, but they said the woman hadn’t been seen in a day or so. Good riddance, Thalassa thought. She was no longer their problem.  
  
–  
  
Grand Moff Tarkin found his guard droids shot and his prisoner missing. It didn’t matter if the jar baby was nothing but a rotting corpse dumped in a sewer drain, his disappearance left Tarkin with no proof that he’d killed Cody. And that would keep him up at night just wondering.  
  
Tarkin knelt like a hunter and examined the caliber of the weapon that shot the droids. It was familiar. Only one person in the house used a gun that small.  
  
He went into his house, into his bedroom, finding only his wife there, sitting on the edge of her bed. No witnesses.  
  
“Where is he?” Tarkin yelled and loomed.  
  
“He who?” Thalassa cowered and trembled involuntarily from conditioned response.  
  
“WHERE? DON’T LIE!” he slapped her across her face.  
  
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she screamed.  
  
It wouldn’t matter. It never mattered.  
  
He hit her again.  
  
Thalassa took it. She got her barbs in here and there, but by and large she took it. Her Lord the Emperor had told her that it was a wife’s burden, assigned by her creator, to accept that her husband had rights and needs and that she had to submit to his will. It was her job to love and support him, no matter if he appreciated her or not.  
  
Just once, it might have been nice to hear a man admit that another man could be wrong.


	2. Better Than Him

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nobody has a clear picture

‘Rat Bottom, Coruscant, first year of the war

  


Rex took off his gloves off to eat his ribs.  
  
The General didn’t.  
  
Rex grew bashful when he realized his new commanding officer was probably self conscious about his lost limb. Rex had bad batch brothers who were born without this extremity or that. They tended to cover up where they could, to fit in.  
  
Rex was sure it wouldn’t have bothered him to see the prosthesis. But they were in public together. Some people could be rude about differences.  
  
Rex scrubbed off his hands with an alcohol cloth before eating as was protocol when running water and soap were unavailable. He didn’t know if they were unavailable, but he was afraid to ask inside the restaurant and be a burden. His lessons had taught him that clean water was valuable in the galaxy, he didn’t want to take it from somebody else when he could go back to the base and wash up properly afterwards at no expense of his own.  
  
“So we’re going to Christophsis with Cody?” Rex asked before he took a bite. He decided conversing over the communal meal was probably acceptable. In table manners class on Kamino, he had been taught to speak before chewing, but that chewing was acceptable while the other person was talking. Kaminoans had socialization as a part of their clone conditioning protocols, so that their products would make passable humans.  
  
“You know Cody?” General Skywalker ate with his hands and chewed while talking. He wiped his hands on his clothes, not his napkin. He grew up on a world where water was so scarce it was currency. A few hundred liters of water could buy a person. Jedi efforts to socialize him had been met with no end of resistance.  
  
Rex had never really thought about it, but he supposed natural born people assumed that all clones knew each other. But there had been millions of them in Tipoca City, all segregated in various groupings.  
  
“I don’t know him well, but every brother knows him.”  
  
“Why?” General Skywalker seemed to detect something.  
  
“Well,” Rex tried to explain something that most people he knew just took for granted, “Back on Kamino, he was the best.”  
  
“The best like how?” Skywalker asked, as if such facts were disputable.  
  
“Well, he had the best numbers. We were ranked daily according to our performance numbers, and this brother was always right at the top of the first class. We younger guys all compared ourselves to him at each developmental level, only natural. Half the academy wanted to be just like him,” Rex clarified the evidence for his beliefs.  
  
“Him? You’re better than him,” Skywalker smirked.  
  
“Well, don’t let him know you said that. It’d bother him,” that was as far as Rex went with light blasphemy.  
  
Skywalker observed something as if it was a tangible fact, “That’s why you’re better than him. You don’t let stupid shit bother you.”  
  
Rex was unsure what to say to that. He and Skywalker had just met, but Rex was inclined to agree with his assessment. He’d never said it to anyone, though. Skywalker just knew it.  
  
Skywalker looked younger than Rex in his face. But the General just talked however he wanted about whomever he wanted.  
  
–  
  
Umbara, second year of the war

  


“General Krell’s here?” Dogma intoned the phrase as a question but phrased it as an observation, thus managing to sound like even the obvious confused him, which played into the impression around the 501st that Dogma was an idiot.  
  
“Something big must be going on,” Fives informed the shiny importantly.  
  
“Master Krell,” Skywalker greeted, “My thanks for the air support.”  
  
“Indeed, General Skywalker, the locals have proved to be more resourceful than we anticipated,” Krell answered. Managing to sound like he looked down on them for it.  
  
Rex thought that was weird. It was the Umbarans’ home, what else did they anticipate but for sentient beings to use every resource at their disposal?  
  
“But, that’s not the reason for your visit,” Skywalker could sense feelings, as any trained Jedi could.  
  
“No. The Council has ordered you back to Coruscant, effective immediately,” Krell brought his message.  
  
“What? Why?” General Skywalker sounded a little afraid he might have been caught at something.  
  
Rex thought it could sound ominous, especially if you had something to hide.  
  
“I’m afraid a request was made by the Supreme Chancellor,” Krell didn’t sound like he respected the Chancellor much, “And the Council obliged. That is all they would tell me.” Krell, and most Jedi, had the impression Skywalker was a little brat that the Chancellor spoiled shamelessly.  
  
“But I...I can’t just leave my men!” Anakin protested.  
  
“I’ll be taking over in the interim,” Krell used a word he didn’t think Skywalker knew. Most of the older Jedi had the impression that Skywalker was dumb.  
  
Rex didn’t want a conflict, “Don’t...worry about a thing, sir. We’ll have this city under Republic control by the time you’re back.”  
  
Skywalker felt soothed by Rex. His buddy had his back.  
  
“Master Krell,” Skywalker said proudly.  
  
Rex snapped to attention.  
  
“This is Rex, my First in Command. You won’t find a finer or more loyal trooper.”  
  
Rex felt blessed to be recommended so highly.  
  
“Good to hear that. I wish you well, Skywalker,” Krell told him.  
  
General Skywalker got on the gunship and left.  
  
“Your reputation precedes you General. It is an honor to be serving with you,” Rex suddenly cringed internally when he thought of how Fives and them must be seeing him. Fives had given him a hard time about how polite he was to non-clones, even when they didn’t deserve it. Fives had thought it disingenuous. Rex wouldn’t have taken that criticism from many people, but Fives was different. Rex actually cared what Fives thought.  
  
“I find it very interesting, Captain, that you are able to recognize the value of honor,” Krell said easily.  
  
Rex was glad he was behind the General, because his face was certainly one of absolute disbelief. No Jedi had ever insulted his intelligence. He felt vertigo.  
  
Then, Krell punctuated it in the most insulting way possible, “For a clone.”  
  
Rex was extremely confused about how he’d phrased it. ‘For a clone’ what? Rex felt the hairs in his ears vibrate as if sensing danger.  
  
“Stand at attention when I address you!” Krell demanded, intimidating with his size.  
  
Rex’s programming required him to comply. But his beliefs were shaken to the core.  
  
The look Fives gave him made Rex’s insides curdle. They shared a bad feeling about this.  
  
\--  
  
Anakin Skywalker’s Flagship, Clone officers’ quarters, returning from the Naboo Festival of Light

  


Rex had nothing on but a towel around his waist. He was holding a bottle of hair dye, giving himself a touch up when General Skywalker busted in.  
  
Rex didn’t even register it as odd, “General?”  
  
Skywalker came up there all the time to hang out, usually when he was avoiding some other Jedi. Sometimes he even slept up there, on the couch or on one of the empty beds.  
  
“Can you believe Obi-Wan? Making us think he was dead. Never mind how it made any of us feel!” Skywalker had been livid with his old Master for the deception.  
  
Rex and his guys hadn’t taken it personally. They’d mostly been laughing at his ridiculous disguise. Not that his Rako Hardeen costume was a bad disguise, it was convincing. But Kenobi’s voice coming out of it was downright silly. Then he had his face adjusted and had to appear in front of people without hair on his head or face. People didn’t recognize him.  
  
“I’m more relieved than anything,” Rex grumbled as he smeared dye. “Anyone else would have had a hard time with Cody.”  
  
If Rex was being perfectly honest, he had also been devastated at the death of his friend Kenobi, but no one had asked him how he felt. He just treated it like a clone death, and moved on to practical concerns, like staffing replacements.  
  
He had been angry at the murderer. Now there was no murder. He found it strange that Skywalker was still encouraging anger. But Rex didn’t feel angry. In his book, that was a win. General Kenobi was alive, what else did he want?  
  
Skywalker flopped in a chair at the common table. “And the Council lied! What happened to all that pompous trash they spout about honesty and integrity.”  
  
“But sir, aren’t you glad Kenobi’s not dead?” Rex snapped off the rubber gloves he’d been wearing to protect his hands.  
  
General Skywalker put his head in his hands, “I’ve never been so relieved in my entire life.” Then he looked up and he was smirking, “He looks so weird. We’re gonna have a field day calling him names until his hair grows back in.  
  
“I’ll tell the guys to start brainstorming on them at evening mess,” Rex was waiting for his product to take effect, so while he waited, he compulsively scrubbed the refresher fixtures to make it clean for the next in line to use it. It was common clone courtesy for facilities, since all of theirs were communal.  
  
“Sir, I’m just happy to be back to work and not be guarding the Chancellor anymore. His place gives me nightmares,” Rex admitted.  
  
“Maybe they’re dark Force visions. He lives right next to the Senate building. That place is full of negative energy,” Anakin joked.  
  
–  
Coruscant, last year of the war  
  
“We’re here to help you, Fives, just come with us. Let us take you back to the temple,” Skywalker stepped cautiously, with Rex right behind him.  
  
The ray shield appeared like an egg around them.  
  
“NO!” General Skywalker shouted and pounded at the inside with a fist.  
  
Fives crawled out from hiding, “I just need you to listen to me. Please!” Fives pleaded.  
  
“I’m not really sure we have any other choice,” Skywalker sounded angry, crossing his arms skeptically.  
  
“I was framed! Because I know the truth...the truth about a plot...a massive deception!” Fives sounded crazy, flinging his arms around to gesture.  
  
Yet, Rex knew he was telling the truth. His faces and body language conveyed nothing of deceit.  
  
“By whom?” Rex asked. He wasn’t sure, but Fives did not look himself. It was like he was sick or on drugs.  
  
“Well, there’s a sinister plot, in the works against the Jedi!” Fives sounded terrified. “I have proof of it, I can prove that everything I know is true beyond a shadow of a doubt!”  
  
“Show me the evidence,” Skywalker's arms still crisscrossing his chest.  
  
“The evidence is...in here,” Fives pointed to a side of his head. “It’s in...it’s in here! It’s in all of us! Every clone.”  
  
Rex felt a bad feeling spread through him like poison from a venomous bite, “What is it?”  
  
“Organic chips, built into our genetic code,” Fives absolutely sounded truthful. “To make us do whatever someone wants. Even kill the Jedi.” He pointed at his head again. “It’s all in here.”  
  
Skywalker looked at Rex with a face that said he remained unconvinced. Skywalker couldn’t know what Rex knew. He didn’t share that face and voice, he didn’t know Fives the way Rex did. Rex’s hand went to the back of his neck, like a reflex. He felt cold.  
  
“Let’s just get you some help first. Then we can review everything. It’ll be okay, Fives. We’ll sort this out,” Skywalker was speaking slowly, like one would to a nutcase.  
  
Rex wasn’t sure he liked Skywalker’s tone.  
  
Fives yelled, “You don’t believe me!”  
  
“Fives, we are listening to you. We only want to help,” Rex didn’t want a conflict.  
  
“How do I know you’re not tricking me? How do I know it won’t be a trap. The Chancellor would try to kill me! I promise you that!” Fives raved in frustration.  
  
“The Chancellor?” Skywalker said in disbelief.  
  
“He’s in on it! I don’t know to what extent, but I know he orchestrated much of this. He told me in the medical bay!” Fives insisted.  
  
“He told you?” Skywalker yelled, “When you tried to assassinate him? You have gone too far, Fives. The Chancellor is not capable of what you claim.”  
  
Rex knew then it had all gone too far, no matter what happened, he’d lost.  
  
\--  
  
Rishi, twenty one years later, The newly assigned quarters of Captain ‘Chief’ Niner

  


Niner almost didn’t hear the door tone over his immersion blender. He shut off the appliance carefully and laid it on a napkin. He’d never had his own kitchen before, so he was afraid to mess anything up.  
  
He hit the door panel and was nearly bowled over by the sight of the guns aimed at him. A split second of terror later, and he realized it was just the queen’s guard droid.  
  
She peeked out from behind it, “Otis, he’s not a threat.”  
  
The guns, which were the droid’s hands, lowered and it walked into the room, scanning it for weapons and explosives.  
  
“Sorry,” Lina scratched the back of her neck and put her other hand behind her back, “He’s hyper-sensitive about new people since the bombing.”  
  
“How can he tell I’m new?” Niner had never met a droid that could differentiate between clones since the old bartender, Sparky, at 79’s.  
  
“Otis was programmed to tell clones apart, he focuses on things like scars,” she explained, “Like how I do.” She looked around, “The place is looking great. I’m really looking forward to the housewarming.”  
  
“Would you taste test my cooking?” he asked.  
  
“I’d love to,” Lina followed him to the kitchen.  
  
Niner used a teaspoon to sample a bit of the bisque he was attempting.  
  
“It’s nice,” Lina tasted. “We have bakeries on board that make fresh bread, if you’re looking for something to serve with it.”  
  
Niner had learned that it was all free. Everything their people had, they shared in kind. All supplies were tracked by Niki’s bureaucracy, she rationed what they could use so everyone had enough. Her fellow Twi’leks from her old prison were put in charge of making sure everything was fair. It worked well, from what he could tell. Niner loved interactions with government.  
  
Lina put down her spoon and spied something on the counter. A printed picture from a holo-still. She picked up up curiously. It didn’t look like one she’d ever seen. And she sometimes felt like she’d seen every image in the clone archive.  
  
She smiled with recognition, “Where is this?”  
  
“Triumphant Two. After Lola Sayu. That was the only time I ever met old Cody before I came here…” Niner remembered suddenly. He was the last one to see the queen’s husband alive.  
  
Then Lina remembered. Caught off guard, she couldn’t help but hurt at the mention of his name. It was all still so new. The look on her face was involuntary and unmistakable.  
  
“I’m so sorry...” Niner trembled.  
  
Lina found herself comforting Niner. The two of them hugged. And cried. And stood that way for longer than either expected.  
  
“No,” she whispered. She backed up to look him in the eyes, “I want people to talk about him.”  
  
“I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have let him out of my sight,” Niner was a wreck.  
  
“No one else could make up his mind for him about what to do,” Lina caught a familiar scent, standing close to him. “New cologne?” she wiped her eyes. The fragrance was just the one Captain Rex used. She hadn’t smelled that in years.  
  
Niner sniffled and turned to look at the picture, “It’s the funniest thing, I remember guys wearing it during the war, but I thought it was named something else, like I remember the label specifically, but stores say they’d never heard of it. I thought they didn’t make it anymore. The brother in the rest house helped me find it.” Niner suddenly looked bashful, “Wolffe used to wear it and I was hoping Niki would like it.”  
  
“You like her, huh?” Lina had seen this particular mental illness before. She felt pity.  
  
“I know she barely knows I exist. But you know...what else could I do? I’ve been dreaming about her my whole life. If I didn’t at least try to let her know how much I like her, I’d feel stupider. I mean, how idiotic would it be to have my first ever party, with my dream girl coming to my home and not at least try to find something to talk to her about.”  
  
“Wait, you said the guy in the rest house recommended it?” Lina felt this confirmed her suspicions about ‘Surf’.  
  
“He said he was at this party, I printed this picture out to show him. It’s the only one I had on my device,” Niner pointed at it. “Or rather, someone took it for me, that’s me passed out on the table there in back. You of course know these guys in the front.”  
  
Lina’s heart melted at the image of the young men, crammed in like sardines in a clone officers quarters on a starship. The six men in front were inadvertently posing in pairs as they were involved in conversations. Commander Wolffe and Obi-Wan, Rex and Anakin, Cody and Fives.  
  
“You should show it to Niki, ask her about the old times. She loves telling stories. I’m sure she knows what they were all talking about,” Lina pointed at the very serious expression Obi-Wan was making at ‘This one time’ Wolffe.  
  
“Listen, Niner, what is your impression of these new people? Is there any reason they might be a threat to me?” Lina asked, not necessarily in an official capacity. She needed someone who could read clone subtext.  
  
“Seems legit. The brother really cares about his guy, I can see. A lot,” Niner answered the one thing he was sure of. The rest of what he had were hunches.  
  
Lina nodded, “Well, I need to speak to the brother alone...it’s important. No one else can know. Can you trust me that this breach of protocol is necessary,” the queen asked him.  
  
Niner was now involved in palace intrigue whether he wanted to be or not. Where would his loyalties be, if push came to shove, he wondered. As it was, no harm had come from his last act of intelligence gathering. He’d actually saved lives. But he wasn’t sure this would be safe or without consequences. He didn’t know why the queen would need to do something in secret. She had all the power in the place. Who was she afraid of?  
  
“I’ll see what I can do,” he decided. It sounded like something, but it was actually noncommittal. He was pretty sure there wasn’t much he’d be able to do.  
  
“Just make sure there is no one watching them at night.”  
  
\--  
  
While their security was getting cleared, so to speak, Rex and Kallus were stuck there on their honeymoon before the wedding had even happened.  
  
They had nothing to do but be together. Their meals were brought to them from the queen’s own kitchen.  
  
The entertainment console got several holo-vid channels, all sports. Which they both actually enjoyed. No matter what the competition, they would pick a side and root for their team whole heartedly. They traded who picked what side to be on and told each other why they decided what they did.  
  
They got each other doing exercises, since the inactivity was making them feel sluggish. They’d both been to military academies, so there was a standard PT regimen.  
  
They’d agreed to display affection when it seemed right. They were still being watched during the day. It would have seemed unnatural if they didn’t make any physical contact. Still, as neither wanted to upset the other, the touches remained gentle and respectful.  
  
It had escalated a bit from the first awkward kisses and hand holding. That had happened naturally with experience. They’d snuggle on the couch sometimes. At night, they had agreed kissing and touching above the waist was acceptable. It had become reassuring.  
  
After lights out, their captors could assume they did more. Their captors were not supposed to be watching them, although they couldn’t be sure. They had constructed a little tent over the bed so that nobody could see them for a few hours at least.  
  
Aside from that, they played cards, for whatever money they brought. The money just kept passing back and forth between them, so it was kind of a wash.  
  
When that became boring, there were lots of actual paper books around.  
  
Rex liked to peruse the selections, imagining they were things his queen liked reading. He found them charming.  
  
He was nestled into a nook built into a large windowsill. The window was frosted over to allow light in, but anything outside was too blurry to see.  
  
“What are you reading?” Kallus asked from the floor, where he was doing push ups.  
  
Rex smirked a little, he knew his pronunciation would be terrible, 

  


“Kaysh copik’laare dral trattok’o,  
Kaysh bev’keldabe beh chaab shuk’la,  
Kaysh alembicke haast beh fierfek,  
Bal haar kal sha kaysh videk

Haar alor beh abiik bal werda,  
Maanla jair bal pir’ekulor,  
‘O jag evaar’la, O ner kyramu’  
Nakar’tuur gar ven ash’amu

‘O alor beh abiik bal werda  
Ni urmankala ori’haat gar sirbu  
Bal ni ven ash’amu nakar’tuur  
A gar ven ash’amu ibi’tuur’.”

  


“Oh, I know that one, I learned it in preparatory school,” Kallus sat on the floor and asked Rex, “Jorhaa’i?”  
  
“Badly,” Rex admitted in Basic. “Old Jango spoke a weird dialect.” Rex hadn’t used it in years, except maybe here and there with Wolffe when they didn’t want Gregor to understand something.  
  
Rex flipped the book pages. It was a nice book, with colorful illustrations. “Our academy trainers were old school Mando. They thought it was good to teach us how to be like them. They naturally thought their culture should be emulated.”  
  
“Sounds familiar,” Kallus nodded. “We learned ancient languages in school. It was one of my certifications in the academy. Of course, it’s practically useless nowadays. What the living Mando speak is something quite different. In the Imperial education system on their homeworld, formal education in their native tongue was discouraged.”  
  
Rex had heard Ketsu and Sabine’s occasional attempts. “Mandalorians weren’t encouraged to learn their language, but Imperial officers were? That seems backwards,” Rex never understood Imperial logic.  
  
“It might have caused solidarity among their populace,” Alexsandr explained. “On Coruscant, we learned it academically, like an artifact of the past.”  
  
“Ah, you could be trusted to study it the right way,” Rex joked. “Some of us were actually good at it. The best one of us at speaking it was my brother Cody, he even knew a dozen dialects.”  
  
“I’ve heard of him,” Alexsandr looked up to subtly remind him of cameras. They weren’t supposed to reveal associations which would elicit questions or witnesses. He reckoned Rex knew what he was doing dropping that name. “He gave the order of termination for the Jedi?”  
  
“That’s what he testified to the Senate,” Rex was careful and stuck with the public record. Though, talking about it made him shiver.  
  
Rex had gotten the Order, just like everybody else. Clones knew who gave it, his face was there on the holo-com. Rex knew something was wrong when he heard himself pronounce the words ‘Lord Sideous’. That was nothing he ever would have said himself.  
  
Skywalker had always said, when training him against Force attack, focus on your memories. Your experiences are what make you sure you’re you and not someone putting thoughts in your head. Rex knew his experiences. Calling someone ‘Lord’ was not one of them.  
  
The original Order 66 message had been sent over a personal comlink and sent out to all senior officers from the command channel by Commander Cody, Chief Operating Officer of the Outer Rim Sieges, essentially the highest ranking clone in the armed forces.  
  
Cody had lied and said that he gave that order. Which meant that HE, Cody’s conscious self had covered for Lord Sideous.  
  
Order 66 was planned. Rex assumed Cody had probably been in on the plot the whole time. He had tried to convince Rex to go along with it. He didn’t admit to the mind control, so branded all clones the voluntary murderers of people, whom everyone in the universe believed were in every way their betters. It was a permanent mark.  
  
Rex hated that brother for that narrative. Because he knew Cody knew better. The vast majority of brothers had never even had the chance to choose complicity. Cody did, in Rex’s mind.  
  
Rex’s anger didn’t do him any good, he hadn’t seen the brother in twenty years. So he might have been shaking his fist, yelling at clouds again. Still, it hurt to never be able to reference or talk about one of the most important relationships of his life because of what he’d done.  
  
“For good or for ill, he got credit for being the man who ended Kenobi. That was no small distinction,” Rex just gave the public record. But if Cody was around there, he would take it as flattery. Which he would like. In truth, Rex had no way of knowing who was there, they’d only seen the same handful of people so far.  
  
Kallus purposefully did not mention knowing the Commander himself, since their association was in Imperial Security. So ‘Charlie’ stuck with the facts, “I mean, it actually elicited respect among the deplorable elements in the galaxy. Do you know what he’s doing these days?”  
  
“Yeah, nah” Rex didn’t actually know, but he had deliberately banished it from his thoughts. He had spent years putting up walls around memories that threatened to get their roots into his heart again.  
  
His remorseful look caused his ‘lover’ to come join him on the window ledge to see the book he was reading.  
  
“I’m glad you’re not mad at me for all this drama.” Rex meant it really. They were actually getting along great.  
  
Alexsandr shifted to get comfortable, “Why be mad? This is the way life goes.” Kallus supposed he really meant that. “Promise me something, though?”  
  
Rex felt lightly kissed the back of his neck. It made the hairs of his arm stand on end under his sleeves. “Anything.”  
  
“Please promise me that you don’t forget whose side you’re on,” Alexsandr whispered.  
  
“What do you mean,” Rex shifted uncomfortably.  
  
“Right now, it’s you and I. I hope that won’t change once we’re out there,” he gestured at the covered window. That you won’t forget when we’re with all of your family and your queen.”  
  
“Forget what?” Rex realized that sounded forgetful.  
  
“To care about how I’m doing. You were always so incommunicative before. I’m worried that...when this wedding happens, and we go to be with your people…once I agree to leave everything behind and spend my life with you...that you won’t make me feel alone. After all we’ve been through, I couldn’t bear to feel lonely anymore. I want to at least feel that even if you’re all I have, I’ll always have you?”  
  
Rex was impressed Alexsandr was this good an actor. He knew it was code to remind him to stick to the plan. Yet, Rex was actually feeling like it was a serious conversation between two people in love.  
  
Rex suddenly remembered something. Back at the fueling station, near Lothal. Zeb had asked Rex to pick out some wine. Rex had recommended whatever was on the top shelf, since that was the most expensive.  
  
While they were in line to pay, Zeb had been chattering along about how he planned to buy property on some place called Lira San and what he’d read about his people’s marriage rules in their religion.  
  
Rex had thought at the time that it was weird, Zeb reading.  
  
But then, it actually all made sense. Zeb’s planned anniversary festivities, his talking about real estate and family traditions.  
  
They were planning a future together. Of course they were. They really were in love.  
  
Rex trembled a little nervously thinking about it. It added some weight to them sitting there like that together. In any other circumstance, they shouldn’t have been, wouldn’t have been. But it was just the two of them there. They had to stick to the plan.  
  
Rex promised himself he’d get his friend back to his real love. He deserved that. Rex wanted good things to happen and true love was a good thing.  
  
Rex finally answered the way he thought a man in love should, “Of course you have me. You’re safe with me.”  
  
Alexsandr’s character at least accepted that and gave him a kiss.  
  
Rex closed his eyes. He allowed himself to feel good about it.  
  
It felt really good, if he was being honest with himself.  
  
Even the touching they’d agreed to was exciting. There was a lot of sensitive skin above the belt.  
  
Rex had meant to ask Alexsandr to stop saying, ‘I love you’ to him, but he kept forgetting. It kept happening. Until he found himself doing it too.  
  
Rex comforted himself with thinking that he might soon have a reason to make plans himself.  
  
The object of his real devotion did seem to be lonely herself. His character wouldn’t have known it, but he, Captain Rex, knew his own experiences. He, maybe better than anybody in the galaxy, knew what Lina looked like when she was sad.  
  
\--  
  
Laneet and Zeb crashed down into water. The ship cannonballed in giant liquid explosion and then bobbed to the surface.  
  
Zeb looked over at his accomplice, “You alright?”  
  
“A little bruised, but otherwise fine,” Laneet checked.  
  
Zeb hit the engine switch a few times. They roared to life,” Not much fuel, but ought to be able to get us to dry land, find somewhere to do repairs.  
  
They came aground and pulled up on a beach. The jungle behind was dense. They found a trail that led inland. After a few run ins with stinging flies and a stream over populated with crayfish, they saw some fire on the foot of the mountain so they followed the path in that direction.  
  
\--  
  
They found a village of Galandans tending their farms. Houses were arranged around permanent hearths in the center of the room of the house. Roofs were thatch and there were large deep porches with patio furniture for hanging out. In the yards around were gardens and animal pens.  
  
They were brought to one man who sat in an honorific chair by the fire of a big house, telling stories. People were drinking and eating at large tables.  
  
The man in the chair greeted them in Basic, “I am Nestor. You are our guests. Tell me, where do you come from?”  
  
“We are not of this world,” Zeb explained. “I’m Zeb, this is Laneet. Our flying transport crashed near here. Can you help us?”  
  
“Flying ships, eh? People try to keep pretty low tech in this sector, it keeps us off the radar of pirates and smugglers. Only one person can help you around these parts with that type of craftsmanship. You must go to her castle, the Witch in the Woods,” the Galandan leader took a sip of his beverage, out of a comically large cup made out of gold.  
  
“What is she?” Laneet asked.  
  
Around them, people at the tables started speaking up, who said they had seen her.  
  
“She has many forms.”  
  
“She has horns and flies.”  
  
“She has snakes on her head and bewitches people with the sight of her.”  
  
“She sits on a throne and wears a sparkling crown.”  
  
“She’s a wrinkled hag and commands a force of twin-men.”  
  
“Twin-men? Are there any here?” Zeb asked.  
  
“No, sir. You must go to the trading post at Moco. They are there sometimes,” the leader handed his cup to a kid to get it refilled from the communal punch bowl. He struggled to lift it.  
  
“I thank you,” Zeb answered politely.  
  
Laneet took it too far, “Could you please find it in your heart to give us free transport and a guide or servant or something, it makes no difference, we’ll take your stupidest person off your hands. We just need to get to the trading post.”  
  
–  
  
They were riding along the path on giant flightless birds with yellow feathers.  
  
“Give us free transport?” Zeb growled, “I’d rather walk.”  
  
Zeb’s bird pecked him.  
  
The guide said something at him.  
  
Zeb sighed.  
  
–  
  
“So for real, I know we’re in this together at least until we can get our ship fixed. But why are we really bothering to save this pair of old queers?” Laneet grumbled.  
  
“What?” Zeb was bothered on several levels. “Why did you say, ‘pair of old queers’?”  
  
“Those two humans, right? The clone and the blonde,” Laneet handed Zeb her scanner that still had the copies of their id’s.  
  
Rex’s Axel Hood id with a picture of a younger clone, and Alexsandr’s standard fake, Charle Remmot, which he’d chosen after a one of his favorite historical figures. Zeb couldn’t remember the details. He wasn’t into books like his boyfriend was.  
  
“I mean, why did you say that about them?” Zeb wasn’t exactly out around strangers. He was the only one of his species not on Lira San, so he felt isolated enough, he didn’t need to give bigots more reasons to harass him. He didn’t think he had ever told Laneet that either he, or either of his friends were ‘queers’.  
  
“I saw them get on the freighter voluntarily, they were holding hands,” Laneet explained what specifically she’d seen on Kothlis that night.  
  
Zeb felt his heart drop like a stone and crash straight into his balls, “What?”  
  
“They were holding hands, I even saw them kiss a few times,” Laneet confessed.  
  
Zeb’s ears lowered and his forehead creased, trembling.  
  
He had been hoping that Alexsandr would accept his proposal that they go back to Lira San and live there together. Whenever they talked about it before, Alexsandr had had his reservations. He didn’t think he’d be welcomed for a lot of reasons. Zeb had wanted the time alone together on the trip back to tell him that he heard every word and that he’d do whatever it took to make him happy. Zeb had planned out to make the best case he could for getting married. But this detour had ruined his plans.  
  
The realization of what it meant dawned on Laneet, “I’m...sorry man. I didn’t think it mattered, I didn’t know. Had you been together long?”  
  
“We were gonna celebrate our year anniversary. Rex told me they were going on a mission…,” Zeb muttered feebly.  
  
“Probably to get you out of the way,” Laneet jumped to a logical conclusion.  
  
“No,” Zeb resisted, “It can’t be what it looks like.”  
  
Laneet shook her head sarcastically, “Suuuuuuuuure, buddy. Suuuuure it isn’t.”  
  
“Oh what do you know about it?” Zeb dismissed. But the facts were eating at him caustically. It looked bad. “The other guy is my friend, we hang out all the time,” Zeb informed her. “He has never been anything but supportive about our relationship.”  
  
“Hangs out with you, or with you and your boyfriend?” Laneet persisted.  
  
“I was friends with him first,” Zeb realized that didn’t mean a thing. Those two did laugh at more of the same jokes when it was the three of them.  
  
“But they have stuff in common with each other, I mean, they’re both the same species,” Laneet figured. “Not everybody accepts inter-special relationships. Maybe they just make more sense together. Face it cat-man, you’re the odd one out.”  
  
Zeb’s heart beat faster as it began to panic. It was at least possible. He didn’t really know much about Rex, personally. Maybe Alexsandr had faced down a lifetime of living among people who were different from him and he just couldn’t do it. Zeb used to think most humans, especially Imperials from Coruscant, were all pretty specist deep down. Even people like Hobbie could throw out the occasional clueless remark, not knowing how it felt to be spoken of in someone else’s terms. Laneet was driving him crazy with her insensitivity about the terms she used.  
  
“My name is Zeb, not cat-man. And you don’t even know who I am,” Zeb took out his insecurity on her by growling a little. He was ashamed of himself for it, though. It was catty. “Are you trying to get on my nerves? Why do you even care about my personal life?”  
  
“Ittu!” Laneet swore, “Because honestly, if you get messy, that affects me. I’ve trusted you with my life, if you can’t keep focus, I might not live to regret it. Now you insist on still trying to rescue them and seeing it with your own eyes what garbage humans are, that’s fine. But the sooner you rectify yourself to what has happened the better. We can find a way to get off world and hopefully back into a money making gig,” Laneet finally had to unload. She had been carrying it in for too long. “I ain’t in this for your mission or these friends of yours. Yet I am helping you, man. You. Because you’re a person I decided I could trust with my life. Don’t get messed up on me!”  
  
“I guess that’s fair. But it’s good for me one way or another. Either I rescue my friends or I get closure,” Zeb hypothetically surrendered, for argument’s sake. It just bothered him. He’d never sensed an attraction between them. How could every instinct he’d had about them be wrong?  
  
“So why a clone, man? I heard they were full of that venereal disease that prematurely ages you,” Laneet prattled.  
  
“Clone?” Zeb referred to the id she’d shown him on the holo-viewer.  
  
“Oh, I just assumed the hottie was the home wrecker,” Laneet shrugged.  
  
“Oh ho. So, shows what you know. My fiancee is the hottie, ‘Charle’.” Zeb mispronounced the fake name ‘Char-lee’ like he always did. He didn’t read well.  
  
“Shit, man, your hot boyfriend ran off to his new guy’s family. Seems serious. Probably planned. I bet they’ve been carrying on for a while. Does he think you might come after them? What if they think you’re threatening? Army clones are violent. I ain’t looking to get shot by some synthetic genetic material.”  
  
Zeb decided he had to stop listening to her, Laneet was making too much sense.  
  
–


	3. All Due Respect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wolffe is captain on a ship of fools

‘Anakin Skywalker’s Flagship’, Second year of the war. 

  


Rex and Fives had just made time for a weight lifting workout before the ship docked. So Rex had invited Fives to clean up in the officers’ quarters, since Rex had it to himself. They were using Rex’s kit and were shaving at the sink. Fives was using the trimmer on his beard, while Rex was shaving with a razor.  
  
There weren’t many people Rex allowed to use his stuff. Most brothers were very territorial about the few things they were allowed to have themselves. Clones took a lot of care in developing personal preferences for such things. Since they were in the field so often, Rex and Skywalker traded back and forth so much that they bought and used the same products.  
  
But Fives was different. Though rank that separated them, that disappeared when it was just them. Fives had come to be the brother-friend Rex could be most himself with. A brother-friendship was a type of relationship not really possible outside of clonedom. Where everyone was identical, brothers were already close. Brother-friends were the immediate circle with whom a brother interacted, who would know that individual brother and what made them specific. Someone who knew you for you.  
  
“So Rex, you going out to 79’s? I commed Wolffe, he said they’re getting mynock wings delivered, want to get in on it?” Fives elbowed him in the back. “The 104th on shore leave, it’s sure to be a piss up.”  
  
“Yeah, nah,” Rex was purposefully non committal. “I might turn up for a drink at most, but I think I got plans.”  
  
Rex was looking forward to some leave time. He hadn’t had a day off in months. As soon as he filed the paperwork at with central command, he could walk off the base and seek out a bit of peace.  
  
He was already looking forward to surprising his girl. He hadn’t seen her since before Lola Sayu. They could go back to her place and he could show her how much he missed her. He’d thought of little else between the briefing and the shooting and the planning and the interpreting. It was okay to think of her that way. She had asked him to.  
  
Rex’s comlink chirped, so he went and picked it out of his kit. It was the General’s signature. General Skywalker had arrived on Coruscant a few days before them, while the 501st was left behind to pack up after the last campaign.  
  
Skywalker’s hologram appeared before them on his viewer looking more grave than Rex had ever seen him. And he’d seen him in some bad situations.  
  
“Rex...something’s happened….Obi-Wan...he’s…dead,” Skywalker had closed his eyes in anguish with the last word.  
  
“I’ll be right there, sir,” Rex said, forgetting everything but his friend. He and Fives looked at each other and made a face that meant agreement.  
  
“I have information about the guy who killed him. Ahsoka and I are gonna go after him,” Skywalker relayed his latest reckless plan. He didn’t clarify whether he had any kind of authorization to do so. But Rex certainly could understand the need to settle the score. General Kenobi was like a father to him.  
  
“He won’t get away with this,” Rex nodded at Skywalker.  
  
“I need you to get to the Senate and take over my assignment guarding the Chancellor,” Skywalker let the duty slide downhill.  
  
“Yes sir,” Rex was dutiful, although he was sorry he’d put on cologne for this. He worried His Excellency would think it was for him.  
  
\--

  


Senate building, Coruscant, outside the Chancellor’s office

  


The hologram of his father’s killer hovered in front of Rex. Hands behind his back. But he was the one giving the orders. That was the order of things.  
  
“Captain Rex, I need to speak with General Skywalker. He’s not responding to my calls,” General Windu said politely, but with an insistent tone that vibrated as a possible threat in Rex’s ears.  
  
“Sir, General Skywalker is...unavailable,” Rex answered. He wasn’t going to budge, he didn’t care that it was another general who asked.  
  
“Where is he, Captain?” Windu kept his tone calm, but his face looked like he had homicidal urges.  
  
Rex nevertheless stuck to his loyalties, as he had no doubt his general would do for him, “I...can’t say, sir.”  
  
“You can’t, or you won’t,” General Windu menaced with nostrils that looked like they might breathe fire. As a superior officer, Windu indeed could have had Rex arrested for insubordination. Rex had to hope that Skywalker would be able to protect him.  
  
Suddenly from his back, Rex felt a finger of cold.  
  
“Anakin is on Nal Hutta,” the Commander in Chief was there to the rescue.  
  
Mas Amedda was beside him. He looked grave, having witnessed the Jedi’s behavior.  
  
The Chancellor had told Amedda that he had heard from ‘a source’ that some Jedi were making clones feel threatened since Umbara. Brothers were worried aggression by a Jedi might be explained away by labeling any disagreement with a clone as insubordination. Authority could be abused, so the ‘source’ had feared.  
  
“Nal Hutta?” Windu crossed his arms with authority. He was one of the few people in the galaxy to speak to the Chancellor as if they were equals.  
  
“Protecting me is only postponing the problem, not solving it,” the Chancellor still talked down to Windu, Rex noticed.  
  
“With all due respect, Chancellor,” Windu managed to make it sound like there wasn’t a lot of respect due, “the Council has a plan in place.”  
  
“Yes, and so does Marolo Eval,” the Chancellor insisted, pointing his finger at the ground for emphasis, “who appears to be several steps ahead of you.” The Chancellor stroked his chin, as if finding it suspicious.  
  
Rex held the comlink still as he was helplessly drawn into the drama.  
  
“For that reason, I asked Anakin to take action,” the Commander in Chief pulled rank. He was the leader of galactic government. It was something he was legally authorized to do.  
  
The Jedi Council’s secrecy was being turned against them. Even Rex kind of liked it how the Chancellor defended General Skywalker for taking action. Taking action seemed to be something the Jedi Council was chronically against.  
  
“He is confident he can find these fugitives and stop this plot against me,” Palpatine lectured.  
  
He sure could, Rex agreed. Rex thought the Chancellor might not be as bad as he’d thought. After all, Skywalker kept telling him that Palpatine was alright.  
  
“I suggest you have more faith in young Skywalker,” the Chancellor chastened. Then he was done, “Captain, if you must escort me home, I’m leaving now.”  
  
Rex couldn’t help but enjoy seeing someone talk to Windu that way. No one he’d seen ever did.  
  
\--  
  
The farm of Cut Lawquane, Saleucami, first year after the war

  


“I told Skywalker about Windu talking to me like that, but he said he talked like that to everybody. What was wrong with it was that I was put in a position of not knowing whose orders I should obey. Skywalker always said he would reform the military if he ever got a chance. He always had so many plans,” Rex reminisced.  
  
“I told him one time how much of a cash bonus I got once Ventress put my eye out,” Wolffe remembered.  
  
“Well, what did he say?” Rex asked Wolffe. He liked talking about his friend. It helped him still feel connected.  
  
Wolffe was prattling on before bed, as he always did. Most people just fell asleep before he did. If you slept in the same room as Wolffe frequently, you just got used to it.  
  
Rex and he had been dossing side by side in the loft of the barn for weeks on end, and Wolffe never seemed to run out of a desire to talk.  
  
“I was surprised, he got mad at the Republic over it when I told him. I thought it was a lot of cash, it was the most I ever had at once. But he told me what he got for his eye scar and it was staggering. Then he said workman’s comp on regular jobs pays out between 96700 and 301870 credits on average to free citizens for eye loss. Minimum was less than 28000 that he had ever heard of. He said he was patron for a Jedi charity for amputees, so he probably read their literature. I guess he even asked the Chancellor about it, and that mummified corpse just told him that the pay outs were dictated by what future lost wages would be. Made sense, I didn’t make much. Besides, with the upgrade,” he poked at his prosthesis, because it didn’t hurt to do, “I wouldn’t lose any work and my wages were eleven credits less a week than Coruscant citizens made on welfare, so it ain’t much to lose. It’s not like I’d ever be out of work. So it never really went anywhere, but I was flattered he was willing to be angry about something unfair to me. I mean, I could see it was unfair, I had just given up doing anything about it. He didn’t end up doing anything about it either, but he tried.”  
  
“Why do you remember all this?” Rex chuckled.  
  
Wolffe pointed at the side of his head, “I got one of those clause gifts.”  
  
“What’s a clause gift?” Rex knew he was encouraging Wolffe to keep talking, but it was a soothing way to go to sleep, hearing something familiar. Wolffe was all he had left from his old life.  
  
“Like in those stories, where like, the gods or demons or whoever is standing in the archetype of power, where the powerful one gives the less powerful being a magic power as a gift. Then, they want to take the gift back, but they can’t for some reason. So as punishment, they turn it into a curse. Like in this one where this god wants to bang this chick, and gives her foresight. She still says no. So he burns her by making it so nobody ever believes her.”  
  
“What happened to her?” Rex had been sucked in.  
  
“Same thing that happened to all women in her time, she got raped a lot. Oh, and then she got murdered in somebody else’s beef,” Wolffe told him honestly.  
  
“And this relates to you how?” Rex yawned and got comfortable.  
  
“I have a really absorbent memory, but I don’t control what I remember. I’m bombarded with details. Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it’s a hindrance. I can never choose what to be clear on. And it’s easy to undermine my confidence,” Wolffe told him.  
  
“Is that why you’re recording stuff all the time? To be sure?” Rex had never asked him why before, and they’d known each other for years.  
  
“Yeah, I guess,” Wolffe was non-committal. Then he turned attention back to something he knew Rex liked to talk about. “You were right to love Skywalker, though. He was a good one. I never saw anything to the contrary.”  
  
Rex was glad to hear someone say it. Sometimes he missed Skywalker so much he couldn’t breathe or his heart slowed pace dangerously. He didn’t know if that was normal. But actually, there was no telling what kind of symptoms a Force signature could cause on people who were bonded with Jedi as closely as they were. Rex imagined the effect of the loss caused something to be damaged unseen at the cellular level.  
  
Rex was not born Force sensitive. But he believed what he’d been told about it, he was able to picture it in his imagination. He had experienced things that he could not describe in tangible terms, but they were life changing experiences from inside out. He had been trained specifically in powers that were invisible to him, given ways to recognize physical reactions to the emotions Force powers elicited, dark and light. Rex had therefore acquired what seemed to be quick reflexes when they were near, or uncommon resistance to their reading his mind. Most Force wielders were not used to being noticed by those that did not give off strong Force signatures themselves. With experience in Force combat, veteran army clones tended to have acquired these types of skills. It was a shame they were nearly extinct.  
  
As far as Rex and Wolffe knew, they and Cut were the only three of them that hadn’t been re-enlisted to the Stormtrooper corps or navy. Their type would be discontinued, so they’d heard. None of them were surprised by any of it. Clones tended to pessimism because their reality had always been bleak, their autonomy restricted as it was.  
  
Skywalker had promised Rex that he would free all the slaves. As soon as he had enough power. Rex had believed in him completely. This private realization had compounded Rex’s tragedy. He mourned the loss, not only of his friend, but of a better universe that might have been.  
  
Wolffe went on, “Even I loved Skywalker, and he didn’t think much of me. He loved you, though. I worried about him. Like, if he didn’t see what a monster the Chancellor was, it was because he deliberately didn’t want to see it. It was apparent. After a while, I figured he just considered him a useful tool for his own ambition. He seemed patriotic for always serving the will of the commander in chief, but then did whatever he wanted, Skywalker was more powerful than that jackass ever was, and more popular too.”  
  
Rex didn’t see it that way, “He would never. He didn’t crave power. He just wanted to be able to make people stop doing bad things. Maybe just make politicians stop bickering and enriching themselves and make the government serve people for a change.”  
  
“Right,” Wolffe agreed, “Making people do what you want is power. Deciding what ‘bad’ is is power. He must have craved a little. Nothing to be ashamed of.”  
  
Rex was annoyed, “Ugh, you’re maddening.”  
  
“But who loves you more than I do?” Wolffe asked, moving over next to him and putting his head on Rex’s shoulder.  
  
“No one,” Rex told him honestly.  
  
Because the person who had loved Rex most in all his miserable life was no longer in it. And it had broken his heart.  
  
With whatever shred of connection Rex had to the Force told him one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt. Anakin Skywalker was dead.  
  
“My dislike of the Chancellor was the reason I was sure the chip was affecting me. For all the good it did knowing that. There was no resisting it,” Rex found it was easier to talk about his difficult experiences with a close friend. He and Wolffe were fourteen years old but looked like middle aged men. Most people put expectations on them that men were supposed to be stoic and unaffected. But when it was just the two of them, nobody else had to know. That made it easier.  
  
“I told you about that time we had to escort him home?” Rex involuntarily felt shame and revulsion at how helpless he’d been.  
  
“I remember at the time, you were pretty shaken up,” Wolffe remembered perfectly. But he wanted Rex to say what he needed to say.  
  
“First he insisted we had to stay at his place. Then he told my squad to guard the way and insisted I join him in his bedroom. He told me to scan the room and then, when no one else could see or hear us, he told me to stay. Just the two of us, behind closed doors. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. Then he said he could have done anything, make me do anything, accuse me of anything. It was chilling, I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or how he meant it. Then in what seemed like the next second, he was telling me that me and my squad could get some sleep down in the basement. Like he’d never said the other stuff. I doubted for a second he said it. But no, I’m sure he said it. He told me I could leave. I checked my wrist com, it had been fourteen whole minutes. We weren’t allowed to take our helmets off until we got to the old servant barracks he had in his basement. Just lots of side by side bunk beds. We had to sleep in our kits, since we were on call all night. My comlink kept chirping me awake every few minutes from his bedroom. Like he was just checking if it worked. But I could hear him breathing in my helmet com. It made me all strung out, not getting any solid sleep. Then I started having these horrible nightmares, like I was being peeled apart by droid pincers. I could feel the pain but I was trapped and immobilized.  
  
“The next day, he cornered me when everybody was waiting outside with the transport. He asked how I was, and wanted to know exactly what I was dreaming of and how it felt, and what the implements looked like. He was a creep,” Rex was blushing as if he was ashamed at finally saying all this. He’d never told anyone in this much detail before. He’d never felt free to tell anyone the ruler of the galaxy treated him that way. He’d found he couldn’t bear the prospect of them not believing him. It would have broken his heart to learn that people he loved would doubt him, or worse yet, telling him it was his fault. So instead, he said nothing.  
  
But Wolffe was different. He believed everything Rex ever told him.  
  
Now, of the things that had been so important they had ruled his actions the year before, none remained. Their previous lives had been crushed to dust by one person. And they had never had the power to even ask him to stop. He’d made them to do what he wanted, from the beginning of their existence to the end. It was a harsh reality to live with for the two of them, but they had time and no other choice.  
  
–  
  
Mustafar, Twenty years later

  


Vader needed strength. He raged at his apprentice.  
  
He tried to find a connection by picturing that face from the identification, but for some reason that helped not at all. She was hidden well.  
  
He was on his own.  
  
Lord Vader accessed the most miserable experience. The worst of his life.  
  
In his bed in the Jedi Temple. In his own bedroom, in the flat he shared with his guardian.  
  
When the visions started. Jarring visions. Of being bound. And held down. Of being violated. Of being humiliated cruelly. Of the rejoicing Tuskens braying. Long days in the heat. The dehydration, the starving, the insects, the filth. The realization that they were taking her to the sacred place to torture her and pick her apart, then burn her to ash.  
  
She, who had done no unkind thing ever in her life, was snatched away to meet that kind of senseless end. He saw and felt it all, things he never thought possible. Cold merciless violence like he’d never imagined.  
  
And where was he then? Safe in his bed at home in the bright center to the universe.  
  
Then, he was near her. His memory of her. Just by the look of her, he knew she had been too far dismembered to survive.  
  
He undid the bonds at her wrists, close behind her to catch her. He eased her gently to the ground. He held her close too him and looked at her face. The cuts were split deep, like parts of her had been taken away already.  
  
“Ani?” Shmi did not sound as surprised as she might have been.  
  
She shouldn’t have been. She had cried his name enough times in the pain of her ordeal. But she didn’t know he knew about that. She didn’t know he could hear her.  
  
Her son was there now. She was not going to waste a moment she had to bask in the light of her joy at seeing him again, “Is it really you?”  
  
“Yeah, mom,” Anakin told her, stroking her wounded hand. “You’re safe.”  
  
Shmi knew it wasn’t true, but she let her heart tell her it was. There was no saving her. “Ani? Ani?” she reached up and touched his face. She was sorry when she stained it slightly with her blood. “Oh, you look so handsome.” She was not going to spend her last moments with her son on something sad. She focused on the positive.  
  
He kissed her hand, tasting copper.  
  
“My son. Oh, my grown up son. I’m so proud of you, Ani,” she caressed his face. All those years of daydreams about him somewhere alive and well, and safe. She finally had a face to put on her visions.  
  
“I missed you,” he whispered. There wasn’t a day went by he didn’t think of her face. And didn’t wish he had it there before him. He had what he wanted, but no comfort could be taken in it.  
  
“Now I am complete,” Shmi reassured him. “I love...”  
  
“Stay with me mom,” Anakin struggled not to sound like he felt. “Everyth...”  
  
“I love….”  
  
Vader descended deeper, to a vision he’d had before the end of the war. Of another mother, caressing the face of her child as she died. Except the baby was bloody, the mother clean and dressed on her deathbed. Beside her, his old Master.  
  
He channeled his anger at the two of them for deceiving him.  
  
Vader hated himself for hating them, but could not escape. Like squirming in a barrel under six feet of earth. Vader urgently needed cruelty to inflict how he felt on someone else. He attempted again to channel his apprentice. 

Rishi

  


Niki knocked off work at the end of the day and went to her laboratory.  
  
Sotna still had not gotten in touch with her, but any attempt to contact would convey the return to base order. So it was only a matter of time.  
  
Since technology was not obeying her will, Niki attempted magic.  
  
She and Sotna had agreed on witching experiments, to attempt a connection through meditations.  
  
Niki dressed for ritual and descended to the crypt. She swept it out with a broom.  
  
She performed the rituals and said her creed. Then she sat on the ledge cut into the living rock that the room was carved from. The ledge had originally been intended as a bed for a body, but the bones had long since been taken out. The creatures interred there had been birds, so the bed was in the shape of a thick, comfortable bird perch. The stone perch was cool through her clothes. Niki closed her eyes and breathed deep to inhale the vapors from the small fire.  
  
She forced her breath in and out, practically hissing from the strain, inducing the trance.  
  
Suddenly she felt pulled down a hole, sucked into a tractor beam of heavy sorrow.  
  
Her Master was feeling bad. He was pulling at the reins of his connections, drawing them down to agony with him.  
  
Niki experienced the smell of the burning wood, the closeness of the room…  
  
Niki knew it was useless to resist. She allowed her mouth to open slightly and let her tongue go limp as if it was floating.  
  
She found herself whispering, “We’d be living a lie...Could you live like that?”  
  
Niki felt his terrible pain of rejection. The humiliation of looking helpless. That feeling like a little boy. But the remaining desire of a man. His need for her was physically painful.  
  
Suddenly Niki felt the feeling change, to one of singular focus. The fury of jealousy. Who did she want if not him?  
  
Niki felt pressure at her neck. It constricted. She struggled to maintain focus on her mantra in her mind to calm her breathing. ‘I like you.’  
  
She found her tongue slipping through it interspersed with words, but she was not conscious of all of it. The choking was making her black in and out. “He cares about us...he knows. He wants to help….All I want is your love.”  
  
“Love won’t save you.”  
  
“Don’t do this...Come away with me. Leave everything else behind, while you still can.”  
  
“I can overthrow him….make things the way we want them to be….Don’t you turn against me.”  
  
His anger was blinding. Niki’s vision went red.  
  
“I love you.”  
  
“Liar!”  
  
“No! NO!”  
  
Niki nearly lost consciousness. Her fingers started to tingle as she lost oxygen.  
  
She needed to break the connection, to find a feeling that would jar him. She needed to feel love, even as he was hurting her. Maybe then he would find mercy. But where pity might have been, she found he had nothing to give.  
  
Her heartbeat in her ear cones made her repeat her charm, “I like you.” She seemed to be offering herself to him as part of a game, to get him to want to feel good.  
  
She channeled love the best way she knew how.  
  
Niki remembered the smell of him. Not the regular Fett musk, but the cologne he wore. The reason he wore it was a convoluted story about how this one time Wolffe.... Something about Rex and Skywalker and a prank. Just thinking of the tale had seized her body with laughter. Details bubbled up from the depths of her memory, from long forgotten places wired directly to her heart. She trembled involuntarily from the funny feeling.  
  
She remembered the fragrance so clearly it was like she was really smelling it. She expected the joy to calm her tormentor.  
  
But then he breathed, and was repelled by the smell. It reminded of him of someone he found repellent.  
  
Of course, he thought, remembering Alis Grady’s face from the id, so like her mother. ‘Yes,” Vader let her hear his thoughts, ‘He is your ‘father’’.  
  
Niki laughed at how wrong his guess at her identity was.  
  
Vader found it jarring, it startled him how sure she was that he was wrong.  
  
Seeing her chance, Niki clawed at wakefulness. She somehow saw a strobe effect on the other side of her eyelids. Her fingertips had blisters in the morning as if they’d been burned. 

  


Coruscant

  


Wolffe went back to the Green Park to meet with Den and change clothes.  
  
Den looked at his activity log in the helmet. “Yeesh, you logged thirty kilometers today? I never move that much in an average day. My performance numbers will definitely go up.”  
  
“You guys’ performance numbers factor in distance moved?” Wolffe was incredulously hitting his vaporizer.  
  
“They have to keep us within weight requirements so the armor fits. We get points for exercise,” Den explained. “But now I gotta write up all of these reports justifying my movements.”  
  
“Oh, I would have written them up, but the language would have looked too obviously improved to be believably you,” Wolffe explained.  
  
“Thanks, Dad,” Den said sarcastically.  
  
“I’m serious, the better your abilities at writing and reading, the easier you could pass for better than people have already decided you are,” Wolffe explained to his ‘son’. He had used his education to play people above his pay grade for years. “So here is the schedule you had today, you started your shift going after that geezer who jumped the turnstyle,” Wolffe reminded.  
  
“That guy who may or may not be a pedophile,” Den cackled.  
  
“Yes. Anyway, then he ran off, so you will follow up on him later. Then you went to the university,” Wolffe continued.  
  
“What was I doing there?” Den didn’t think that sounded like something he was supposed to do.  
  
“You were looking to ask some questions about a subversive artist. You obtained contact information and interviewed the administrative assistant. She is retiring the first of the year, she has decided. Make sure to cite that in the report. It will stand out, especially if they check. But that investigation about the artist is ongoing, so anything else about the sting is classified.”  
  
“My day sounds exciting,” Den was worried this would sound too over the top and raise questions.  
  
Wolffe nodded, “Wait, it gets better. Then you went over to the Palace to meet with a possible witness who had claimed she wanted to report some anti-Imperial sentiments expressed in her workplace. If they doubt the veracity of this one, just admit that the person you claim to have interviewed was in fact a girl you’d been seeing and you had sex in a walk in fridge.”  
  
“You did?” Den asked.  
  
“No, clown! YOU did, if anybody asks,” Wolffe specified.  
  
“Ooooooh, riiiight. I get it. Was she nice?” Den asked honestly with the first thing he thought.  
  
“THEN you went out to the loading dock around back to interrogate a guy about his decrepit mother being a disturber of the peace. Again, part of an ongoing investigation, will give details later,” Wolffe waved his hand casually.  
  
“And where are you going now?” Den asked, “If they ask for updates on my decrepit father?”  
  
“Well, I gotta go check in with my girl,” Wolffe shrugged.  
  
“The girl from the fridge?” Den tried to follow.  
  
“What? No. I mean, she’s a friend of mine...but,” Wolffe realized all of a sudden what he’d actually said.  
  
“You keep talking about meeting up with ‘your girl’. I thought it was your woman, you know, somebody that wouldn’t mind you?” Den admitted he didn’t really know what his ‘dad’ did all day.  
  
“Yeah, nah. I guess when I’ve been saying ‘my girl’ I don’t actually mean girlfriend, I mean like my...she’s a girl who is my family, my girl.”  
  
It surprised him that he’d been saying it, since by the phrase he had only ever meant one other person. But it had been a long time since he’d had a girl he felt responsible for in any way. 

  


‘Rat Bottom, Coruscant, residence of Mrs. Marija Grady

  


Wolffe took a metro over to the Palace district. On the walk home, he stopped at an appliance store and ordered a meat freezer to be delivered to Alis’ place to store Den’s incineration dummy. Then to the bodega, where he bought several cans of General Plo’s favorite old pureed soups. Toothless Marjia wouldn’t starve if she was left alone. He had taken the stove knobs and gotten her an express cooker at the second hand store. So she was less danger to herself. The soups were just heat and drink.  
  
General Plo had needed a mask to breathe on most life-supporting planets, since he needed the helium content. So all food had to be consumed through a straw. Wolffe and General Plo had shared what must have been thousands of liquid meals together.  
  
On the way from the metro stop, Wolffe found an old chair on the curb for trash pickup. It was easily fixable, so he took it.  
  
“Speedy delivery,” Wolffe knocked at the door portal. He figured it might make him seem less like someone who needed to steal. Fortunately, he knew to jump out of the way of the door.  
  
The doorway opened and a few blaster bolts came flying through, singing holes in the wall across the way.  
  
“I didn’t call for any groceries!” Marija’s voice shouted in Basic. It wasn’t easy to understand her, since she didn’t have any teeth and also possessed an Eriadan accent.  
  
Wolffe wondered where she’d gotten the weapon. He thought Alis said she’d confiscated all of them.  
  
Marija saw Wolffe taking cover on the wall outside the door portal, “Oh, it’s you. Alis isn’t here,” she waved him in. “We’ve got time.”  
  
“New blaster?” Wolffe asked. He set down his chair in the living room area and carried his basket to the kitchen corner.  
  
“My welfare credits came,” she told him matter of factly. “I got this down the corner.”  
  
“Don’t you need any kind of permit or anything?” he asked, like small talk.  
  
“Where are you from? They sell these everywhere,” she said it like she thought he was stupid, “If I don’t have one, the bad guys with them will come and rape me.”  
  
Wolffe wondered whether he should say anything. Marija groped him on the ass.  
  
“I mean, have you seen the kinds of species they have on this planet? They are scary looking. Rodians, Askajians, dirty, dirty Twi’leks,” Marija visibly shuddered.  
  
“I have seen them,” Wolffe nodded, unpacking the cans and putting them in the cabinet. Dirty dirty Twi’leks were Wolffe’s all time favorite kind of people. He remembered he had not yet been to a strip club since he was back on world. It was saving him a lot of money.  
  
Wolffe was lost in thought, so he didn’t see Marija raise her gun and stun him.  
  
He woke to find himself tied to his chair. Marija was removing his pants.  
  
“Oh crud,” he swore.  
  
Ezan came through the door, “Kark Mom! Again?”  
  
“Oh hey, Ezan!” Wolffe absolutely could not control his laughter. “How you been?”  
  
“What the absolute kark are you doing here?” Ezan asked.  
  
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, you still owe me money,” Wolffe was just by living down to Ezan’s expectations of him. “Your ma here asked what I’d take as currency...”  
  
“WHAT?” Ezan looked spooked.  
  
Marija spoke to her son in her Eriadan dialect, which he understood, “Get out of my house or I’ll shoot you.”  
  
He spoke to her in Basic, he barely remembered how to speak his mother tongue, “MA! Get this man out of here, he’s absolute scum!”  
  
“He did the shopping. When did your useless father ever do the shopping? When did you, you turd?” Marija argued back.  
  
“You need to leave,” Ezan ordered Wolffe.  
  
Wolffe was not a dog, “I’m the one here legally, you’re the one with the restraining order.”  
  
“A Stormtrooper told me to meet him here. When the authorities get here, then you’ll be sorry,” Ezan tried to take command.  
  
Wolffe had a first name and it happened to be Commander, “They ain’t coming. That guy works for me.” Wolffe looked at his partner, “Marija, stun him.”  
  
She did. She and Wolffe finished what they started.  
  
\---  
  
Ezan awoke tied to the chair.  
  
His mother stood over him, weapon aimed. Goddamn Wolffe was there too, armed as well. It hadn’t been a dream.  
  
“Blast,” he swore under his breath.  
  
“Oh, you’re awake. Just give us a minute,” Wolffe turned to Marija, “So as I was saying, and HE told ME his mom was part Mandalorian or some nonsense.”  
  
“Like a sixty-fourth? Right mom?” Ezan defended.  
  
“I said your great grandfather was some rando, not Mando. You just said that to impress your martial arts class. Were you still saying that garbage even as an adult?” Marija shook her head.  
  
“Any-who,” Wolffe pivoted, “I’m not actually here about the money.”  
  
“Then why?” Ezan could imagine no reason.  
  
“I’m looking for someone,” Wolffe responded.  
  
“Who?” Ezan asked. Suddenly his eyes opened wide in realization, “SHE sent you!” His ex-wife had always had all those clones hanging around. It made sense she had friends. “Look, I have no idea where Alis is. Her orphanage burned down, that’s all they told me.”  
  
Wolffe chuckled, “Well, I guess it makes sense the Empire would lie. It’s bad optics to lose kids.”  
  
“He signed her away, the turd,” Marija told Wolffe in Basic. “He let them take her off world.”  
  
“Mom, I had a job, it’s not like I could just leave her with you all day,” Ezan defended. Somewhat reasonably.  
  
Anyone who was already inclined to believe men would think he was the rational one, while Marija was hysterical.  
  
But her sanity on the issue was real, Wolffe thought. Alis had been upset by just that thing, and she wasn’t crazy.  
  
“She had a mother who loved her,” Wolffe reminded. He was feeling bad. Because he was the one who’d pleaded with Alis to give her dad a chance. This guy wasn’t just a dick, he was dangerous.  
  
“The whole neighborhood knows she was feeble minded. You know, she was so low IQ she allowed herself to be talked into bed by that jar baby from the army,” Marija swerved.  
  
“You don’t say….,” Wolffe pretended to be shocked.  
  
“MA! This asshole is one of them!” Ezan shouted.  
  
“What? You didn’t tell me that!” Marija screamed at Wolffe and aimed her gun, “I thought you were normal!!”  
  
“YOU? Thought I was NORMAL? For Knozzle’s sake, I don’t know whether to laugh or be insulted. What the ever loving crap do YOU think normal is?” Wolffe wasn’t worried, he’d taken her clip out when she wasn’t looking. “You are the craziest woman I have ever seen! Marry me, baby!”  
  
She tried several times to shoot him, but was greeting with only empty clicks, “Damn. It’s jammed. I guess I will, then. The gods have spoken.”  
  
“Baby!” Wolffe was very excited. Being officially married, even if for a day, was on his bucket list. They kissed in front of her son.  
  
Ezan shuffled, “Can you untie me yet? If she’s not dead or going to jail, I don’t want to be here any more.”  
  
“Where do you think your wife is?” Wolffe pivoted again. He had already decided he had not much further use for Ezan, and Alis didn’t really either.  
  
“I don’t know, some system that sounded like food...Rangoon...Ragu...”  
  
“Ragoon system? Which habitable moon?” Wolffe hated people who hadn’t traveled. They had no curiosity about the galaxy around them. They acted like ignorance was cool.  
  
“Six….? Four…? One of those...wait why don’t you just ask her?” Ezan was still operating on the assumption that his ex-wife had sent the clone. “Wait, if you don’t know, then who sent you?”  
  
A realization didn’t even have time to dawn on him before Wolffe inserted the clip and stunned him again. He dragged Ezan more than 500 meters away, outside the door and left him sleeping in an alley on some soiled linens from a restaurant.  
  
–  
  
Alis burst in just as Wolffe and Marija were sitting down for soup together. “You’ll never believe what just happened!”  
  
“What?” Wolffe asked politely, then sipped on his straw.  
  
“So the building is still there….” Alis was trying to calmly go through at tell the story in the proper order. It didn’t make sense telling them about the monster if she didn’t set the scene. They might not believe her.  
  
“Stand up straight, you slouch!” Granny scolded.  
  
“Yes?” Wolffe didn’t want to steal her thunder, but he was impatient to get to his turn to talk.  
  
“So I was there, but it was dark, and I was all by myself. And...some...one came in and attacked me.”  
  
“Who?” Wolffe asked.  
  
“I didn’t see well. It wasn’t human. Horns and I think sharp teeth. I guess it was maybe an alien species, I don’t know,” Alis explained. “But I thought of that woman on Seelos, I thought it might have been her. Or worse.”  
  
Wolffe knew it wouldn’t be her. Rex had admitted that that woman had caught up with him eventually. It was Rex, whom she was looking for all along. Well, Rex and Ahsoka. Alis had just been innocent collateral damage in their war. Anyway, Rex had neutralized the threat. He shot that woman. She came after him and he shot her. Didn’t even have his weapon on stun. Rex never did.  
  
When that woman came after Alis, Wolffe had just stunned her. Just like when he had shot Ahsoka back when she was wanted for he grisly murder of dozens of clones in the line of duty and one helpless prisoner in state custody. But even then, Wolffe had his weapon on stun. Wolffe had always thought he deserved some credit for that. Of course, Ahsoka hadn’t been trying to kill Wolffe, the way that ‘Inquisitor’ was probably trying to do to Rex. But still.  
  
“It told me to give over what I’d found. I got spooked and tried to run away, we fought,” Alis admitted. “I thought after, maybe it’s just some scavenger who lives there and just heard me come along and found me. It might still be there if we hurry.”  
  
“What makes you think I want to go where there is some hostile alien or monster,” Wolffe couldn’t understand her logic.  
  
“To see,” Alis couldn’t understand his lack of curiosity.  
  
“I believe you,” Wolffe shrugged and sipped his soup.  
  
“But then, the weirdest thing, though, it had a jetpack! Not just anybody can fly one of those,” Alis was pleading for his interest. “An old one, white, like clone armor.”  
  
“Now that is interesting. What was the decoration? Can you reproduce it?” Wolffe pulled a drawing tablet out of his messenger bag. It was Gregor’s old pad. He figured if he could identify the brother it belonged to, he knew enough to figure out whether this person was friend or foe.  
  
“Okay,” Alis took out a pen from her belt pouch and attempted to recreate the image in her head. She had always had a very photographic memory. It was the reason she had been trained in scouting back at the academy on Concord Dawn. It was a life that felt ages ago, but Alis still had the memories. She sketched thoughtfully and handed the pad back to Wolffe.  
  
“This? No, it can’t be this,” Wolffe thought he must be having a psychotic break. He found that disappointing. He thought he had his chemistry managed.  
  
“Why can’t it be this?” Alis felt defensive. She felt sure. But, as a woman, she was used to having her certainty undermined.  
  
“Because this, pleasance, is MY jetpack,” Wolffe insisted.  
  
“I’m telling you what I saw. Why can’t you believe me that I saw your jetpack? I mean, you used to live there,” Alis reasoned.  
  
“Too big a coincidence,” Wolffe sipped his soup with the straw.  
  
“Ergo, it’s not a coincidence! For kark’s sake!” Alis practically screamed.  
  
Grandma shouted in Eriadan, “We’re getting married.”  
  
“WHAT?” Alis screamed.  
  
“Keep it down, the neighbors will hear!” Marija yelled.  
  
Wolffe’s black comlink buzzed, “I have to take this.” He stepped outside, taking his soup with him.  
  
“What do you mean you’re getting married?” Alis was now at wit’s end.  
  
“I don’t like how you’re shouting,” Marija shook her fists and ranted in Eriadan, “I’ll be damned if I leave property to my idiot son.”  
  
“Why do you care? You won’t be alive,” Alis grumbled.  
  
“I don’t want my abusive husband’s abusive spawn to have my property. So I told Wolffe to take out the trash. He done the shopping and gave oral. Now I’m marrying Wolffe and that’s that,” Marija took her granddaughter’s blaster out of the holster suddenly. It was set to stun, and Marija simply ended the argument by stunning Alis. Then she forgot Wolffe was outside and locked him out. Then she had a few drinks and went to sleep in her chair, gun in hand.  
  
–  
  
Den got back to base, his sergeant congratulated him on how productive he was, he was all over the city. Did he find any anti-Imperials? No, but several things were worth following up on. Den filed the reports based on Wolffe’s explanations. To his disappointment, he did not get to use the story about how he had a girlfriend who worked in the palace kitchen. Would have been nice to be able to talk about it. But nobody cared. People working for the Empire got used to feeling completely emotionally isolated.  
  
He had ended up paying the prostitute to just sit and talk to him. She was nice enough to oblige, since she was probably thrilled she didn’t have to work very hard. But it had been nice to have somebody listen and look him in the face.  
  
–  
  
Wolffe checked the comlink, Koyi had just sent a ping to confirm she’d meet him. Since he’d been locked out, Wolffe figured he’d better go check about the monster.  
  
He didn’t want to, and certainly not alone. But as usual, he didn’t want to send someone else on a job he wouldn’t do himself.  
  
He had expected feelings in the face of his memories. The place looked as bad as he supposed it always had. But with no hope of seeing Niki there, the neighborhood was like the rotted corpse of a person, all bones and dust, no flesh, no spirit. His feelings towards the place had been cursed from hope to fear. All he wanted to do was run away.  
  
He approached the darkened line of buildings. The door portal still lay open like a mouth. He went up to the apartment.  
  
There were signs of a skirmish, but no evidence as to the nature of the creature. All was dead quiet, no monsters, no jetpacks.  
  
He knelt down. His arthritic fingers trembling, he put his hand fully down on the floor. That steadied him.  
  
Wolffe felt like he could feel an echo of her presence where she’d once stepped. With those feet he used to hold in his lap and caress. Their skin was smooth and sensitive and under the green was a strange blush of red where the blood vessels were dense.  
  
His one eye flooded tears. Clones weren’t noisy criers. They usually hid what they were doing if they ever had to cry. Being covered by helmets most of the time hid a lot of clones’ emotional reactions. It had been a while since he cried for real. Nobody around, he figured nobody would care.  
  
He could not seem to make his heart stop wishing he could be with Niki, but nevertheless, she wasn’t there. The place remained cold and dark. He wasn’t sure what else he was expecting.  
  
Something shiny on the ground caught his eye. He picked it up. A tiny steel pendant with the symbol of the Republic. On the back was scratched Alis’ name. Wolffe knew she’d want it back, so he put it in his pocket.  
  
Then he got the hell out of there.


End file.
